NASA’s Fermi Makes First Gamma-ray Study Of A Gravitational Lens

An international team of astronomers, using NASA’s Fermi observatory, has made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source.

This accomplishment opens new avenues for research, including a novel way to probe emission regions near supermassive black holes. It may even be possible to find other gravitational lenses with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

“We began thinking about the possibility of making this observation a couple of years after Fermi launched, and all of the pieces finally came together in late 2012,” said Teddy Cheung, lead scientist for the finding and an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

In September 2012, Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected a series of bright gamma-ray flares from a source known as B0218+357, located 4.35 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of a constellation called Triangulum. These powerful flares, in a known gravitational lens system, provided the key to making the lens measurement.

Link To Full Story

NASA’S Fermi Measures Cosmic ‘Fog’ Produced By Ancient Starlight

This plot shows the locations of 150 blazars (green dots) used in the EBL study. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made the most accurate measurement of starlight in the universe and used it to establish the total amount of light from all of the stars that have ever shone, accomplishing a primary mission goal.

“The optical and ultraviolet light from stars continues to travel throughout the universe even after the stars cease to shine, and this creates a fossil radiation field we can explore using gamma rays from distant sources,” said lead scientist Marco Ajello, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University in California and the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light. Since Fermi’s launch in 2008, its Large Area Telescope (LAT) observes the entire sky in high-energy gamma rays every three hours, creating the most detailed map of the universe ever known at these energies.

The total sum of starlight in the cosmos is known to astronomers as the extragalactic background light (EBL). To gamma rays, the EBL functions as a kind of cosmic fog. Ajello and his team investigated the EBL by studying gamma rays from 150 blazars, or galaxies powered by black holes, that were strongly detected at energies greater than 3 billion electron volts (GeV), or more than a billion times the energy of visible light.

Full Story: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/cosmic-fog.html

NASA’s Fermi Detects The Highest-Energy Light From A Solar Flare

During a powerful solar blast on March 7, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected the highest-energy light ever associated with an eruption on the sun. The discovery heralds Fermi’s new role as a solar observatory, a powerful new tool for understanding solar outbursts during the sun’s maximum period of activity.

A solar flare is an explosive blast of light and charged particles. The powerful March 7 flare, which earned a classification of X5.4 based on the peak intensity of its X-rays, is the strongest eruption so far observed by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT). The flare produced such an outpouring of gamma rays — a form of light with even greater energy than X-rays — that the sun briefly became the brightest object in the gamma-ray sky.

Full Story: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/highest-energy.html

Latest Gamma-ray Census Highlights Cosmic Mysteries

Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

Every three hours, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope scans the entire sky and deepens its portrait of the high-energy universe. Every year, the satellite’s scientists reanalyze all of the data it has collected, exploiting updated analysis methods to tease out new sources. These relatively steady sources are in addition to the numerous transient events Fermi detects, such as gamma-ray bursts in the distant universe and flares from the sun.

Earlier this year, the Fermi team released its second catalog of sources detected by the satellite’s Large Area Telescope (LAT), producing an inventory of 1,873 objects shining with the highest-energy form of light. “More than half of these sources are active galaxies, whose massive black holes are responsible for the gamma-ray emissions that the LAT detects,” said Gino Tosti, an astrophysicist at the University of Perugia in Italy and currently a visiting scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif.

Full Story: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/gamma-ray-census.html