Gamma Ray Sky Map
A view of the entire sky captured by the recently launched Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope shows bright radiation coming mostly from the Milky Way’s galactic plane.
Using the craft’s first 95 hours of active observation, mission scientists produced a map of gamma ray sources as seen from Earth that shows the same level of detail as previous maps that took more than a year to create.
In addition to the full-sky map, the first data from Fermi’s burst monitor include records of “a gamma ray burst about once a day … the highest rate of detection of any satellite,”
The scale of Gamma Ray bursts:
The intense flashes of gamma rays can release within seconds the same amount of energy that the sun will put out over its entire ten-billion-year lifetime.
