Gamma-ray Telescope

gamma-ray telescope, instrument designed to detect and resolve gamma rays from sources outside Earth’s atmosphere.

Gamma rays are the shortest waves (about 0.1 angstrom or less) and therefore have the highest energy in the electromagnetic spectrum. Since gamma rays have so much energy, they pass right through the mirror of a standard optical telescope. Instead, gamma rays are detected by the optical flashes they produce when interacting with the material in a specially designed instrument such as a scintillation detector. Earth’s atmosphere blocks most gamma rays, so most gamma-ray telescopes are carried on satellites and balloons. However, some ground-based telescopes can observe the Cherenkov radiation produced when a gamma ray strikes Earth’s upper atmosphere.

The first gamma-ray telescope was carried on board the American satellite Explorer 11 in 1961. In the 1960s the Vela defense satellites designed to detect gamma rays from clandestine nuclear testing serendipitously discovered enigmatic gamma-ray bursts coming from deep space. In the 1970s Earth-orbiting observatories found a number of gamma-ray point sources, including an exceptionally strong one dubbed Geminga that was later identified as a nearby pulsar. The Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991, mapped thousands of celestial gamma-ray sources. It also showed that the mysterious bursts are distributed across the sky, implying that their sources are at the distant reaches of the universe rather than in the Milky Way. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in 2008, discovered pulsars that emitted only gamma rays.