NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has created a stunning all-sky time-lapse movie of the dynamic Universe from 14 years of data. The path of the sun, the gamma-ray glow of the Milky Way, and the distant galaxy known as the Blaser are highlighted. The film reveals both the beauty and complexity of the universe and showcases high-energy events within and beyond our galaxy, such as eruptions from supermassive black holes. (Artist’s concept) Credit: SciTechDaily.com
NASAThe Fermi Space Telescope is releasing a 14-year time-lapse movie that reveals the dynamic universe through gamma-ray imaging. it is, milky wayDistant galaxies powered by gamma-ray glow, solar flares, and black holes.
The universe comes to life in this all-sky time-lapse movie created from 14 years of data acquired by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Our sun silently orbits through the sky, occasionally flaring up against the backdrop of high-energy sources within and beyond our galaxy.
“The Milky Way’s bright, steady gamma-ray glow is interrupted by intense flares of near-light-speed jets that last for days, powered by the supermassive black hole at the center of the distant galaxy,” said Senior Staff Scientist. said Seth Digel. Who created the image at his SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California? “These dramatic eruptions can appear anywhere in the sky, occurred millions to billions of years ago, and their light is just reaching Fermi as we see it. ”
from solar flare Black Hole JET: NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team has created a unique time-lapse tour of the dynamic, high-energy sky. Fermi Deputy Project Scientist Judy Lacusin narrates the film, compressing 14 years of gamma-ray observations into his six minutes.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the NASA/DOE/LAT Collaboration
Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light. The film shows the intensity of his gamma rays with energies exceeding 200 million electron volts detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) between August 2008 and August 2022. For comparison, visible light has an energy of 2 to 3 electron volts. Lighter colors indicate the location of more intense gamma ray sources.
“The first thing that catches your eye in this film is the sound source that steadily arcs across the screen. It’s our sun, and its apparent movement reflects the annual orbital motion of the Earth around it.” ” said Fermi Deputy Project Scientist Judy Lacusin, who narrated the film’s tour, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
![Fermi Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope](https://scitechdaily.com/images/Fermi-Gamma-ray-Large-Area-Space-Telescope-777x536.jpg)
An artist’s conception of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in orbit. Credit: NASA
Most of the time, LAT detects the sun faintly due to the influence of accelerated particles called cosmic rays, which are atomic nuclei traveling at near the speed of light. When they come into contact with the sun’s gases or the light it emits, gamma rays are produced. But sometimes, the sun suddenly brightens up in a powerful eruption called a solar flare, temporarily making our star one of the brightest sources of gamma rays in the sky.
The film shows two different views of the sky. The rectangular view shows the entire sky with the galaxy’s center in the middle. This highlights the Milky Way’s central plane, which glows with gamma rays produced from cosmic rays striking interstellar gas and starlight. There are also many other sources scattered around, such as neutron stars and supernova remnants. Above and below this central band, we look out beyond our galaxy into a wider universe studded with bright, rapidly changing light sources.
Most of these are actually distant galaxies that are better seen from different vantage points centered around our galaxy’s north and south poles. Each of these galaxies, called blazars, has a central black hole with the mass of more than a million suns.
Somehow, black holes produce jets of matter that move at extremely high speeds. In Blazer, one of these jets is seen almost directly below, which enhances its brightness and variability. “The fluctuations indicate that something has changed in these jets,” Racusin said. “We regularly monitor these sources and alert other telescopes, both in space and on the ground, when something interesting is happening. We quickly catch these flares before they disappear. “The more observations we can collect, the better we will be able to understand these events.”
Fermi plays a critical role in a growing network of missions working together to capture the unfolding changes in the universe.
Many of these galaxies are very far away. For example, the light from the blazar known as 4C +21.35 has been propagating for 4.6 billion years, which means that the flare-ups we see today actually happened when the sun and solar system began to form. means. Other bright blazars are more than twice as far away as her, providing impressive snapshots of black hole activity across cosmic time.
Many short-duration events that Fermi studies cannot be seen in time-lapse, such as gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful cosmic explosions. This is the result of processing data over several days to sharpen the image.
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is a partnership between astrophysics and particle physics managed by Goddard. Fermi was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with significant contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.