NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: Completes five years in space - mission extended

This view shows the entire sky at energies greater than 1 GeV based on five years of data from the LAT instrument on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Brighter colors indicate brighter gamma-ray sources. 

Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

During its five-year primary mission, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has given astronomers an increasingly detailed portrait of the universe's most extraordinary phenomena, from giant black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies to thunderstorms on Earth.

But its job is not done yet. On Aug. 11, Fermi entered an extended phase of its mission—a deeper study of the high-energy cosmos. This is a significant step toward the science team's planned goal of a decade of observations, ending in 2018.

"As Fermi opens its second act, both the spacecraft and its instruments remain in top-notch condition and the mission is delivering outstanding science," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division in Washington.

Paul Hertz

Fermi has revolutionized our view of the universe in gamma rays, the most energetic form of light.

The observatory's findings include new insights into many high-energy processes, from rapidly rotating neutron stars, also known as pulsars, within our own galaxy, to jets powered by supermassive black holes in far-away young galaxies.

The Large Area Telescope (LAT), the mission's main instrument, scans the entire sky every three hours.

The state-of-the-art detector has sharper vision, a wider field of view, and covers a broader energy range than any similar instrument previously flown.

Peter Michelson

"As the LAT builds up an increasingly detailed picture of the gamma-ray sky, it simultaneously reveals how dynamic the universe is at these energies," said Peter Michelson, the instrument's principal investigator and a professor of physics at Stanford University in California.

Fermi's secondary instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), sees all of the sky at any instant, except the portion blocked by Earth.

This all-sky coverage lets Fermi detect more gamma-ray bursts, and over a broader energy range, than any other mission.

These explosions, the most powerful in the universe, are thought to accompany the birth of new stellar-mass black holes.

Bill Paciesas

"More than 1,200 gamma-ray bursts, plus 500 flares from our sun and a few hundred flares from highly magnetized neutron stars in our galaxy have been seen by the GBM," said principal investigator Bill Paciesas, a senior scientist at the Universities Space Research Association's Science and Technology Institute in Huntsville, Ala.

One of Fermi's most striking results so far was the discovery of giant bubbles extending more than 25,000 light-years above and below the plane of our galaxy.

Scientists think these structures may have formed as a result of past outbursts from the black hole—with a mass of 4 million suns—residing in the heart of our galaxy.