Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: The First Year – Peter Michelson

Date: Thu. October 22nd, 2009, 4:15 pm-5:15 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has completed its first year of observations. The two instruments on Fermi cover more than 7 decades in energy: the Large Area Telescope (LAT) is a wide field-of-view pair-conversion telescope covering the energy range from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV; the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor complements the LAT in its observations of transient sources and is sensitive to X-rays and g-rays with energies between 8 keV and 40 MeV. During the first year in orbit, Fermi has continually surveyed the entire sky every 3 hours and observed a large number of sources that include active galaxies, pulsars, compact binaries, globular clusters, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), as well as the Sun and the Moon. Fermi has also made important new measurements of the Galactic diffuse radiation and has made precise measurements of the spectrum of cosmic-ray electrons and positrons from 20 GeV to 1 TeV. Highlights of results from the first year sky survey will be discussed along with a projection of what is ahead.