Fourteen years of the Universe seen with gamma rays, the most intense of electromagnetic radiation, condensed into a few minutes: this is the timelapse published by NASA with data from Fermi, the space telescope also created with the contribution of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the National Institute of Astrophysics and the Italian Space Agency, which shows the emissions produced by a great variety of sources from pulsars to quasars up to the spectacular collisions between neutron stars up to the flares of our Sun.
“The bright and constant glow of the Milky Way’s gamma rays – commented Seth Digel, of the SLAC particle accelerator laboratories in California and one of those responsible for the Fermi data analysis – is punctuated by intense flashes of jets lasting close to days at the speed of light powered by supermassive black holes in the nuclei of distant galaxies.” Launched into orbit in 2008 and still operational, albeit with some ailments due to age, Fermi was designed to observe the entirety of the celestial vault in a wavelength invisible to human eyes, gamma rays.
These are the most intense radiations, with energy millions of times greater than that of visible light, which allow us to study a vast series of cosmic phenomena starting from pulsars, small rapidly rotating stars that emit intense radiation, up to what happens near the black holes intent on swallowing the dust clouds that surround them.
Data that has been aggregated into a single video of a few minutes in which it is possible to see the continuous appearance and disappearance of gamma ray sources both within our galaxy and from external points, emitted by various objects. Among these there is one that describes a cyclical arc in the sky: the Sun, whose emissions vary based on the activity of that moment and which turns out to be the brightest object during violent flares or explosions.
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