NASA’s Fermi telescope sees mother of all gamma-rays blast

October 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astrophysicists have used the H.E.S.S. telescopes to detect gamma rays emitting from the heart of the NGC 253 galaxy.

August 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is starting a second career and taking its first shots of the cosmos since warming up. The infrared telescope ran out of coolant May 15, 2009, more than five-and-one-half-years after launch.

July 15th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found the core of an active galaxy, where a feeding supermassive black hole drives oppositely directed particle jets, as revealed by gamma rays. Gamma rays from the narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy PMN J0948+0022 show that its central black hole drives a fast-moving particle beam.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable "dark matter" believed to make up much of the mass of the universe. In two separate scientific papers, the astrophysicists show that this distribution of gamma rays can be explained by the way "antimatter positrons" from the radioactive decay of elements, created by massive star explosions in the galaxy, propagate through the galaxy.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to discover 16 pulsars. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using a worldwide combination of diverse telescopes, astronomers have discovered that a giant galaxy's bursts of very high energy gamma rays are coming from a region very close to the supermassive black hole at its core. The discovery provides important new information about the mysterious workings of the powerful "engines" in the centers of innumerable galaxies throughout the Universe.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has found most dark gamma-ray bursts occur in normal galaxies detectable by large, ground-based optical telescopes. Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away.

May 28th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A telescope designed by a University of Miami physicist and an international team of collaborators has produced the clearest images of starburst galaxies, revealing a new picture of the universe in its early stages. The innovative new telescope, called BLAST (Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope), was built by an international research team, which included Joshua Gundersen, University of Miami professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences.

May 14th, 2009 Astronaust prepare for 1st spacewalk to fix HubbleCAPE CANAVERAL — The hard work of repairing the Hubble Space Telescope begins soon. Astronauts John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustel (FOY-stahl) will exit the space Shuttle Atlantis Thursday morning for the first of five spacewalks to upgrade Hubble.

May 5th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has 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," said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings.

April 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA has developed a flash on-line game about telescopes, featuring its next-generation spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope. The game, called "Scope it Out!" includes an introduction to telescopes and four matching games where you can compare simple telescopes to both Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope.

April 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has used the world's biggest radio telescope to look deep into the brightest galaxies that NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see. The study solidifies the link between an active galaxy's gamma-ray emissions and its powerful radio-emitting jets.

April 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has suggested that a brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago, and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again in the future. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses.

March 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astrophysicists, using telescopes on the ground and in space, has uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy classified as a Blazar. The picture that emerges from these first-ever simultaneous observations with optical, X-ray and new-generation gamma-ray telescopes is much more complex than scientists expected and challenges current theories of how the radiation is generated.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have developed a new map combining nearly three months of data from NASA's Fermi Telescope to obtain the best-ever view of gamma rays in space. To Fermi's eyes, the universe is ablaze with gamma rays from sources ranging from within the solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away.