NASA has released an animation of the gamma-ray light detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) instrument on the Fermi Space Telescope. The images represent a year of observations, between February 2022 and February 2023.
The circles in the animation reveal each observed gamma-ray source and its brightness fluctuations. These sources represent only a subset of the more than 1,500 records of brightness variations collected by the LAT over 15 years of activity.
More than 90% of these bright purple circles are blazars — active galactic centers where supermassive black holes feed on matter and eject jets at nearly the speed of light aimed toward Earth. They are one of the high-energy neutrinos emitters detected on Earth.
In the animation, each frame represents three days of observations; thus, considering that the LAT scans the sky every three hours, there are 24 observations compiled in just 1 frame. In total, the animation contains nearly 3,000 observations made over the course of a year.
The reddish band in the center of the map is the central plane of the Milky Way, which also consistently produces gamma rays. There, where the colors are lighter, a more intense glow occurs. The yellow circle that runs through the map is the apparent trajectory of the Sun during the year.
Gamma rays are the most energetic type of electromagnetic radiation in the entire spectrum. While visible light ranges from 1 to 2 electron volts, the sources detected by the LAT emit energies ranging from 20 million to over 300 billion electron volts.
Source: FERMI
