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Meet Fermi: Our Eyes on the Gamma-Ray Sky

Black holes, cosmic rays, neutron stars and even new kinds of physics — for 10 years, data from our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have helped unravel some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. And Fermi is far from finished!

On June 11, 2008, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the countdown started for Fermi, which was called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) at the time. 

The telescope was renamed after launch to honor Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American pioneer in high-energy physics who also helped develop the first nuclear reactor. 

Fermi has had many other things named after him, like Fermi’s Paradox, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the synthetic element fermium.

Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory

The Fermi telescope measures some of the highest energy bursts of light in the universe; watching the sky to help scientists answer all sorts of questions about some of the most powerful objects in the universe. 

Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), which can view 20% of the sky at a time and makes a new image of the whole gamma-ray sky every three hours. Fermi’s other instrument is the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. It sees even more of the sky at lower energies and is designed to detect brief flashes of gamma-rays from the cosmos and Earth.

This sky map below is from 2013 and shows all of the high energy gamma rays observed by the LAT during Fermi’s first five years in space.  The bright glowing band along the map’s center is our own Milky Way galaxy!

So what are gamma rays? 

Well, they’re a form of light. But light with so much energy and with such short wavelengths that we can’t see them with the naked eye. Gamma rays require a ton of energy to produce — from things like subatomic particles (such as protons) smashing into each other. 

Here on Earth, you can get them in nuclear reactors and lightning strikes. Here’s a glimpse of the Seattle skyline if you could pop on a pair of gamma-ray goggles. That purple streak? That’s still the Milky Way, which is consistently the brightest source of gamma rays in our sky.

In space, you find that kind of energy in places like black holes and neutron stars. The raindrop-looking animation below shows a big flare of gamma rays that Fermi spotted coming from something called a blazar, which is a kind of quasar, which is different from a pulsar... actually, let’s back this up a little bit.

One of the sources of gamma rays that Fermi spots are pulsars. Pulsars are a kind of neutron star, which is a kind of star that used to be a lot bigger, but collapsed into something that’s smaller and a lot denser. Pulsars send out beams of gamma rays. But the thing about pulsars is that they rotate. 

So Fermi only sees a beam of gamma rays from a pulsar when it’s pointed towards Earth. Kind of like how you only periodically see the beam from a lighthouse. These flashes of light are very regular. You could almost set your watch by them!

Quasars are supermassive black holes surrounded by disks of gas. As the gas falls into the black hole, it releases massive amount of energy, including — you guessed it — gamma rays. Blazars are quasars that send out beams of gamma rays and other forms of light — right in our direction. 

When Fermi sees them, it’s basically looking straight down this tunnel of light, almost all the way back to the black hole. This means we can learn about the kinds of conditions in that environment when the rays were emitted. Fermi has found about 5,500 individual sources of gamma rays, and the bulk of them have been blazars, which is pretty nifty.

But gamma rays also have many other sources. We’ve seen them coming from supernovas where stars die and from star factories where stars are born. They’re created in lightning storms here on Earth, and our own Sun can toss them out in solar flares. 

Gamma rays were in the news last year because of something Fermi spotted at almost the same time as the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo on August 17, 2017. Fermi, LIGO, Virgo, and numerous other observatories spotted the merger of two neutron stars. It was the first time that gravitational waves and light were confirmed to come from the same source.

Fermi has been looking at the sky for almost 10 years now, and it’s helped scientists advance our understanding of the universe in many ways. And the longer it looks, the more we’ll learn. Discover more about how we’ll be celebrating Fermi’s achievements all year.

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Researchers Just Found (For The First Time) An 8th Planet Orbiting A Star Far, Far Away

Our Milky Way galaxy is full of hundreds of billions of worlds just waiting to be found. In 2014, scientists using data from our planet-hunting Kepler space telescope discovered seven planets orbiting Kepler-90, a Sun-like star located 2,500 light-years away. Now, an eighth planet has been identified in this planetary system, making it tied with our own solar system in having the highest number of known planets. Here’s what you need to know:

The new planet is called Kepler-90i.

Kepler-90i is a sizzling hot, rocky planet. It’s the smallest of eight planets in the Kepler-90 system. It orbits so close to its star that a “year” passes in just 14 days.

Average surface temperatures on Kepler-90i are estimated to hover around 800 degrees Fahrenheit, making it an unlikely place for life as we know it.

Its planetary system is like a scrunched up version of our solar system.

The Kepler-90 system is set up like our solar system, with the small planets located close to their star and the big planets farther away. This pattern is evidence that the system’s outer gas planets—which are about the size of Saturn and Jupiter—formed in a way similar to our own.

But the orbits are much more compact. The orbits of all eight planets could fit within the distance of Earth’s orbit around our Sun! Sounds crowded, but think of it this way: It would make for some great planet-hopping.

Kepler-90i was discovered using machine learning.

Most planets beyond our solar system are too far away to be imaged directly. The Kepler space telescope searches for these exoplanets—those planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system—by measuring how the brightness of a star changes when a planet transits, or crosses in front of its disk. Generally speaking, for a given star, the greater the dip in brightness, the bigger the planet!

Researchers trained a computer to learn how to identify the faint signal of transiting exoplanets in Kepler’s vast archive of deep-space data. A search for new worlds around 670 known multiple-planet systems using this machine-learning technique yielded not one, but two discoveries: Kepler-90i and Kepler-80g. The latter is part of a six-planet star system located 1,000 light-years away.

This is just the beginning of a new way of planet hunting.

Kepler-90 is the first known star system besides our own that has eight planets, but scientists say it won’t be the last. Other planets may lurk around stars surveyed by Kepler. Next, researchers are using machine learning with sophisticated computer algorithms to search for more planets around 150,000 stars in the Kepler database.

In the meantime, we’ll be doing more searching with telescopes.

Kepler is the most successful planet-hunting spacecraft to date, with more than 2,500 confirmed exoplanets and many more awaiting verification. Future space missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the James Webb Space Telescope and Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will continue the search for new worlds and even tell us which ones might offer promising homes for extraterrestrial life.

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*All images of exoplanets are artist illustrations.

You Don’t Have to be a Rocket Scientist to Conduct Research in Microgravity

Putting your life’s work on top of a rocket may seem like a daunting task, but that’s exactly what scientists have been doing for decades as they launch their research to the International Space Station.

This season on #NASAExplorers, we’re exploring why we send science to space, and what it takes to get it there! 

Watch this week’s episode to meet a team of researchers who are launching an experiment to space for the first time.

Follow NASA Explorers on Facebook to catch new episodes of season 4 every Wednesday!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Bend Your Mind With Special Relativity

Ever dreamed of traveling nearly as fast as light? Zipping across the universe to check out the sights seems like it could be fun. But, not so fast. There are a few things you should know before you jump into your rocket. At near the speed of light, the day-to-day physics we know on Earth need a few modifications. And if you’re thinking Albert Einstein will be entering this equation, you’re right!

We live our daily lives using what scientists call Newtonian physics, as in Isaac Newton, the guy who had the proverbial apple fall on his head. Imagine that you are on a sidewalk, watching your friend walk toward the front of a bus as it drives away. The bus is moving at 30 mph. Your friend walks at 3 mph. To you, your friend is moving at 33 mph — you simply add the two speeds together. (The 30 mph the bus is moving plus 3 mph that your friend is moving inside the bus.) This is a simple example of Newtonian physics.

However, imagine that your friend on the bus turns on a flashlight, and you both measure the speed of its light. You would both measure it to be moving at 670 million mph (or 1 billion kilometers per hour) — this is the speed of light. Even though the flashlight is with your friend on the moving bus, you still both measure the speed of light to be exactly the same. Suddenly you see how Einstein’s physics is different from Newton’s.

This prediction was a key part of Einstein’s special theory of relativity: The speed of light is the same for any observer, no matter their relative speed. This leads to many seemingly weird effects.  

Before talking about those surprising effects, it’s good to take a moment to talk about point of view. For the rest of this discussion, we’ll assume that you’re at rest — sitting in one spot in space, not moving. And your friend is on a rocket ship that you measure to be traveling at 90% the speed of light. Neither of you is changing speed or direction. Scientists give this a fancy name — an “inertial frame of reference.”

With the stage set, now we can talk about a couple of super-weird effects of traveling near the speed of light. Relativity messes with simple things like distance and time, doing stuff that might blow your mind!

Let’s say you have a stick that is 36 inches long (91 centimeters). Your friend on the rocket doesn’t know the stick’s length, so they measure it by comparing it to a ruler they have as they zoom past you. They find your stick is just 16 inches (40 centimeters) long — less than half the length you measured! This effect is called length contraction. And if they were moving even faster, your friend would measure your stick to be even shorter. The cool thing about relativity is that both of those measurements are right! We see these effects in particle physics with fast-moving particles.

If your friend was traveling to our nearest neighbor star, Proxima Centauri, how far would they think it was? From Earth, we measure Proxima Centauri to be 4.2 light-years away (where one light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 5.8 trillion miles). However, your friend, who is traveling at 90% the speed of light in the rocket, would measure the distance between Earth and Proxima Centauri to be just over 1.8 light-years.

That’s just length … let’s talk about time!

Now let’s say you and your friend on the rocket have identical synchronized clocks. When your friend reaches Proxima Centauri, they send you a signal, telling you how long their trip took them. Their clock says the trip took just over two years. Remember, they measure the distance to be 1.8 light-years. However, you would see that your clock, which stayed at rest with you, says the trip took 4.7 years — more than twice as long!

This effect is called time dilation — time on moving clocks appears to tick slower.

None of this accounts for your friend accelerating their rocket or stopping at Proxima Centauri. All of this math gets more complicated if you and your friend were speeding up, slowing down, or changing directions. For instance, if your friend slowed down to stop at Proxima Centauri, they would have aged less than you on their trip!

Now you’re ready for a few tips on near-light-speed travel! Watch the video below for more.

Now, if you need to relax a bit after this whirlwind, near-light-speed trip, you can grab our coloring pages of scenes from the video. And if you enjoyed the trip, download a postcard to send to a friend. Finally, if you want to explore more of the wonders of the universe, follow NASA Universe on Facebook and Twitter.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

What’s a Space Headache?

Headaches can be a common complaint during spaceflight. The Space Headaches experiment improves our understanding of such conditions, which helps in the development of methods to alleviate associated symptoms, and improve the well-being and performance of crew members in orbit. This can also improve our knowledge of similar conditions on Earth.

Hi ! What's your music playlist when you're on a mission ? :)

Luckily I have a lot of friends that already make amazing mixes for me already down here on Earth, so I’m counting on them to set me up well for my first mission.  My favorite genre is Indie rock, though I’m also a fan of jazz and classical music (I grew up playing the piano, flute, piccolo, and saxophone in various bands, wind symphonies, and jazz bands).  Music always succeeds in transforming my mood, I’m continually amazed at its power!  It will definitely be integral to my psychological well-being on a space mission.

Can You Guess Which Football Signals Robonaut Is Doing?

Meet Robonaut, our humanoid robot (which means it’s built to look like a person). This makes it easier for Robonaut to do the same jobs as a person. 

Robonaut could help with anything from working on the International Space Station to exploring other worlds…and now he might even take up a job as a referee!

We had Robonaut act out a few football signals. Can you guess what they are?!

Signal #1

Signal #2

Signal #3

Signal #4

Signal #5

Signal #6

Signal #7

Signal #8

Signal #9

Get the answers:

But it’s not all fun and games for Robonaut...from performing movements like a referee to helping astronauts on the space station, it’s important to have a robot that can perform the same tasks as humans. Why?  

Robonaut could someday be tested outside the space station. This testing would determine how well Robonaut could work with, or instead of, spacewalking astronauts. Designers even have ideas for sending a robot like Robonaut to another world someday. If testing goes well, who knows where Robonaut - or a better robot based on Robonaut - could end up?

To learn more about connections between space and football, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/football   

To learn more about Robonaut, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/robonaut2 

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300 Consecutive Days in Space!

Today marks astronaut Scott Kelly’s 300th day in space! He, along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, are testing the limits of human research during their one-year mission onboard the International Space Station.

While most expeditions to the space station last four to six months, their time on orbit has been doubled. By increasing the length of their time in space, researchers hope to better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to long-duration spaceflight.

What happens when you’ve been in space for 300 days?

1. You might get bored and play ping pong with yourself…and a water droplet.

2. There’s a chance that you’ll get a Tweet from someone famous…like the President!

3. There may come a time where you’ll have to fix something outside the station during a spacewalk.

4. You might develop a ‘green thumb’ and grow plants in space.

5. And, there’s no doubt you get to see the Earth from a totally new perspective.

To learn more about the one-year mission, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/1ym 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Warm yourself by the fire, NASA style!

Look no further than this cozy and relaxing fireplace – complete with four RS-25 rocket engines to fill your hearth with light. (And 8.8 million pounds of thrust to power your party to the Moon.)

It’s Not a Phase – We Love the Moon

International Observe the Moon Night is Oct. 21 and everyone's invited! Find a Moon-gazing party near you, learn about lunar science and exploration, and honor cultural connections to the moon.

This year, we want to know what the Moon looks like around you. Take a look at these photography tips, then snap a picture of the Moon and tag us! You may be featured on Tumblr’s Today page on Oct. 21.