Fermi Large Area Telescope reveals pulsing gamma-ray sources
Wednesday, September 9, 2009 - 12:28
in Astronomy & Space
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Space Science Division and a team of international researchers have positively identified cosmic sources of gamma-ray emissions through the discovery of 16 pulsating neutron stars. Using the Large Area Telescope (LAT), the primary instrument on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope satellite, the discoveries were made by conducting blind frequency searches on the sparse photon data provided by the LAT. The photons had energies between 20 Mega-electron-volts (MeVs) and 300 Giga-electron-volts (GeVs) - tens of millions to hundreds of billions of times more energetic than the photons we see with the human eye...