* Astronomy

NASA's Fermi Telescope Probes Dozens of Pulsars
With NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, astronomers now are getting their best look at those whirling stellar cinders known as pulsars. In two studies published in the July 2 edition of Science Express, international teams have analysed gamma-rays from two dozen pulsars, including 16 discovered by Fermi. Fermi is the first spacecraft able to identify pulsars by their gamma-ray emission alone.

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NASA's GLAST mission is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S.
Somewhere out in the vast depths of space, a giant star explodes with   the power of millions of suns. As the star blows up, a black hole  forms at its center. The black hole blows two blowtorches in opposite  directions, in narrow jets of gamma rays. NASA's Gamma-ray Large Area  Space Telescope, or GLAST, will catch about 200 of these explosions,  known as gamma-ray bursts, each year. GLAST's detailed observations  may give astronomers the clues they need to unravel the mystery of  what exactly produces these gamma-ray bursts, which are the brightest  explosions in the universe since the Big Bang.

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Since its launch last June, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colorado, Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery.

"Fermi's Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it's also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays" - Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings. Moiseev is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Md.

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Title: The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: The First Eight Months
Author: Peter Michelson

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was launched by NASA on June 11, 2008. The Large Area Telescope (LAT) instrument measures cosmic gamma-ray radiation in the energy range 20 MeV to >300 GeV, with supporting measurements by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) for gamma-ray bursts from 8 keV to 30 MeV. The LAT, with a large improvement in sensitivity, large field-of-view, and much finer angular resolution compared to previous high-energy telescopes, observes 20% of the sky at any instant and covers the entire sky every 3 hours. Fermi  is providing an important window on a wide variety of high-energy phenomena, including pulsars, black holes and active galactic nuclei; gamma-ray bursts; the origin of cosmic rays and supernova remnants; and searches for hypothetical new phenomena such as supersymmetric dark-matter annihilations and exotic relics from the Big Bang.~ This talk will describe results obtained during the first eight months of the first year sky-survey phase of the Fermi mission.

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Ed ~ The signature from dark-matter annihilations seen by the ATIC balloon experiment was not seen by the Fermi telescope.