Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST)

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, U.S. satellite, launched June 11, 2008, that was designed to study gamma ray-emitting sources. These sources are the universe’s most violent and energetic objects and include gamma-ray bursts, pulsars, and high-speed jets emitted by black holes. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the lead agency, with contributions by France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Sweden.

Fermi carries two instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), which work in the energy range of 10 keV to 300 GeV (10,000 to 300,000,000,000 electron volts) and are based on highly successful predecessors that flew on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) in the 1990s. Unlike visible light or even X-rays, gamma rays cannot be focused with lenses or mirrors. Therefore, the main detectors of the LAT are made of silicon and tungsten strips at right angles to each other. Gamma rays produce electron-positron pairs that then ionize material in the strips. The ionized charge is proportional to the strength of the gamma ray. The arrangement of the strips helps determine the direction of the incoming radiation. Cosmic rays are far more common than gamma rays, but the LAT has materials that interact with cosmic rays only and with both cosmic rays and gamma rays, so cosmic rays can be distinguished and ignored. In its first 95 hours of operation, the LAT produced a map of the entire sky; CGRO took years to produce a similar map.

The GBM consists of 12 identical detectors, each containing a thin single-crystal disk of sodium iodide positioned as a face of an imaginary dodecahedron. An incident gamma ray causes the crystal to emit flashes of light that are counted by light-sensitive tubes. The same flashes may be seen by up to half of the detectors but at different intensities depending on the detector’s angle to the source. This process allows the calculation of a gamma-ray burst’s location so that the spacecraft can be oriented to point the LAT at the source for detailed observations.

In 2008 Fermi discovered within the supernova remnant CTA 1 the first of a population of pulsars that are seen only in gamma rays. The gamma-ray emissions do not come from particle beams at the poles of the pulsars, as is the case with radio pulsars, but instead arise far from the surfaces of the neutron stars. The precise physical process that generates the gamma-ray pulses is unknown. Fermi has also increased the number of known millisecond pulsars (the fastest rotating pulsars, with periods of 1 to 10 milliseconds) by discovering 17 such objects.

In some theories of physics that would unite general relativity, which describes the universe on the largest scales, with quantum mechanics, which describes the universe on the smallest scales, space-time would be quantized into discrete pieces. If space-time had such a structure, photons with higher energies would travel faster than those with lower energies. By observing photons of different energies that originated from a gamma-ray burst 7.3 billion light-years from Earth and arrived at Fermi at the same time, astronomers were able to limit any possible grainy structure of space-time to smaller than about 10⁻³³ cm.

In 2010 Fermi observed the first gamma-ray emission from a nova. It had been previously thought that novas did not generate enough energy to produce gamma rays.