NASA’s Fermi Captures Gamma Ray Images

NASA released on Tuesday a combined image showing bursts of gamma rays glowing across the plane of the Milky Way, as also high-energy stars called pulsars, and a flaming galaxy billions of light-years away. The images have been acquired from 95 hours of initial observation by its newest observatory, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, renamed Fermi.

Launched on June 11 this year, Fermi has produced in a matter of days, what took years for NASA's now-defunct Compton Gamma-ray Observatory to put together.

The GLAST's gamma-ray tracker was developed by a team led by UC Santa Cruz physicists at the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP). Robert Johnson, who led the SCIPP team, commented that the tracker, which is made up of about 900,000 active detection channels, is doing exceedingly well.

Fermi is gathering data on gamma rays that originate near black holes and pulsars. The rays, invisible to the naked eye, can be studied only from the edges of the observable universe as the earth's atmosphere absorbs them.

Jon Morse, the director of astrophysics for NASA, called it “our extreme machine,” and stated it would go a long way in helping them crack ‘crack the mysteries of these enormously powerful emissions.’

The telescope was renamed Fermi on Tuesday, after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), who won the Nobel Prize for physics and developed a plausible theory of particle acceleration.

Justifying the move to change the name, Paul Hertz, chief scientist for science missions at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. said, “Fermi was the first to suggest how cosmic particles could be accelerated to high speeds, and this work provides the foundation for understanding the powerful phenomena his namesake will observe.”

Developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is the outcome of an astrophysics and particle physics partnership.

Academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S. are some other important collaborators on this high-performance tool from the NASA stable.

The Fermi is expected to spend at least the next five years bringing to light hitherto unknown facts about gamma rays for aiding the studies of cosmologists and astronomers.

It is hoped that the NASA’s new wonder machine will unearth the mechanics of matter around massive black holes, discover many new pulsars or high-energy stars in our own galaxy, reveal the facts behind gamma-ray bursts and alter or improve our present perception of physical laws.