A First Year View of the Galaxy with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
Elizabeth Hays
Goddard Space Flight Center
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been surveying the sky in
high-energy gamma-rays for more than a year. The ground-breaking
capabilities of the Large Area Telescope (LAT) enable increasingly deep
coverage over a broad energy range, ~20 MeV to >300 GeV, providing answers
to questions from previous satellite observations, allowing study of the
brightest sources in exquisite detail, and revealing brand-new classes
of GeV sources. This talk will focus on the Galactic objects detected
with the LAT. Highlights include a new population of gamma-ray pulsars,
gamma-ray binary systems, and the discovery of emission from a globular
star cluster containing many millisecond pulsars. The firm association of
GeV emission with these sources is a key step toward developing a vastly
improved picture of the Galaxy in gamma rays. This has implications beyond
understanding these objects individually, or more generally as a class.
It also opens the way to the first studies of spatially extended GeV
emission associated with supernova remnants, which have long been
favored as sites of the acceleration of cosmic rays. I'll review some
of the exciting first year LAT results in these areas and discuss future
prospects for the ongoing mission.
Date: | Tuesday, 29 September 2009 |
Time: | 16:00 |
Where: | McGill University |
| Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, R.E. Bell Conference Room (room 103) |
Contact: | Ken Ragan |
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