Latest Fermi Stories

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online On Saturday, April 27, the Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope detected a sudden, powerful flux of high-energy gamma-rays, indicating a historic burst event in a distant galaxy. The instrument then notified other telescopes located in space and on the ground that a Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) had been detected. Fermi’s main instrument the Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected gamma-rays as high as 94 giga-electron volts (GeV), nearly three...

[ Watch the Video: Fermi's Close Call with a Soviet Satellite ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA said on Tuesday its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was able to dodge a 1.5-ton bullet in space. Julie McEnery, a project scientist for Fermi, opened her email at the end of March and found an automatically generated report arrived from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) team. The document said Fermi was just one week away from an...

NASA [ Watch The Video ] NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light -- gamma rays -- from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study using observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals the first clear-cut evidence the expanding debris of exploded stars produces some of the fastest-moving matter in the universe. This discovery is a major step toward understanding the origin of cosmic rays, one of Fermi's primary mission goals. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Scientists have been trying to find the...

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online For much of the last century, scientists have been searching for a mysterious substance thought to make up about 85 percent of the total mass of the Universe. Without it, galactic rotation curves, galaxy interactions and the very structure of the Universe are inconsistent with our knowledge of physics. Yet, this so-called dark matter remains elusive. One reason researchers have had such a difficult time finding and...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to new research led by Michigan Technological University, spacetime might be less like a foamy beer and more like a smooth Einsteinian whiskey. Robert Nemiroff and his team studied the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths to reach this heady conclusion. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope recorded these tracings in 2009. About 7 billion light years from Earth, a gamma ray outburst threw the photons from...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The source of a gamma ray flare that shot past Earth throughout much of 2011 has been discovered, and contrary to popular theory, they did not occur close to their galaxy’s central black hole, NASA officials announced on Monday. Using data collected by both the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers at the U.S. space agency have discovered that the...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Using a combination of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the world's largest radio telescope, astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online It would be a mistake to think of black holes as having a uniformity of size or mass. They range from modest objects formed from the end of an individual stars' life to behemoths billions of times more massive that rule the centers of galaxies. A new study recently published in the journal Science, however, shows that high-speed jets launched from active black holes share fundamental similarities despite the mass, age or...

[Watch Video: Fermi Finds Radio Bursts From Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is new and improved, and ready to start sending back some images of high-energy light mysteriously produced above thunderstorms. The space agency updated the telescope with improved data analysis techniques and a new operating mode to the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard Fermi. This will enable the telescope...