01/01/2024
Fermi's 14-Year Time-Lapse of the Gamma-Ray Sky
See also on Youtube: https://youtu.be/oAq5f1TMN0o
The entire gamma-ray sky is unwrapped into a rectangular map, with the center of our Milky Way galaxy located in the middle, in this 14-year time-lapse of the gamma-ray sky. A moving source, our Sun, can be seen following a curving path through the sky, a reflection of Earth’s annual orbital motion. Watch for strong flares that occasionally brighten the Sun. The central plane of our galaxy is on full display, glowing in gamma rays produced when accelerated particles (cosmic rays) interact with interstellar gas and starlight. Pulsars and supernova remnants, all bright gamma-ray sources for Fermi, also fleck the Milky Way band. Above and below the bright central plane, where our view of the broader cosmos becomes clearer, splotches of color brighten and fade. These sources are jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light driven by supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. The jets happen to point almost directly toward Earth, which enhances their brightness and variability. Over a few days, these galaxies can erupt to become some of the brighest objects in the gamma-ray sky and then fade to obscurity. In these maps, brighter colors indicate greater numbers of gamma rays detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope from Aug. 10, 2008, to Aug. 2, 2022.
Music credit: "Expanding Shell" written and produced by Lars Leonhard.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA/DOE/LAT Collaboration
Producer: Scott Wiessinger (Rothe Ares Joint Venture)
Science writer: Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
Visualizer: Seth Digel (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)
Scientist: Judith Racusin (NASA/GSFC)
NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
