The Universe is known to be the home of some incredible energy-generating phenomena, capable of creating radiations that are billion of times more energetic than the light visible to our eyes. In order to better understand what exactly produces the energy and how this affects the surrounding environment, NASA developed the Gamma-ray Large Are Telescope (GLAST), an instrument capable of observing gamma rays in the Universe with unprecedented sensitivity.

Since the new observatory began its mission on June 11, 2008, scientists have been working on calibrating its two instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM). On August 26, the LAT team revealed a fully-sky image of the Milky Way, glowing in gamma rays. And this is just the first of the long series of observations that GLAST, now renamed Fermi, is going to make.

NASA explained that the image depicts the Milky Way glowing in gamma rays due to collisions with accelerated nuclei called cosmic rays. In addition to that, Crab Nebula and Vela pulsars also appear on the image. These are rotating neutron stars that emit pulses of radiation from gamma rays to radio waves.

These rotating neutron stars are actually linked to a supernova explosion – the death of a star – and they have been discovered thanks to their powerful radio emissions.

Another pulsar that appears on the same image, Geminga, which lies in the constellation Gemini, was the first unidentified gamma-ray source discovered by the SAS-2 satellite, and later by COS-B satellite. Geminga is not a radio source, NASA explained. A fourth bright spot on the LAT image can be found 7.1 billion light-years away, beyond our galaxy. The 3C 454.3 is an extremely bright object and lies in the constellation Pegasus.

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) scans the sky every three hours when in survey mode, which will occupy most of its observing time in the first year of activity, NASA said. LAT provides an unprecedented sensitivity to gamma rays in the energy range of 20 MeV to 300 Gev. These observations will allow scientists to monitor rapidly changing sources.

In addition to LAT, the GLAST Burst Monitor (GBM) has the mission to observe transient sources, and is sensitive to X-rays and gamma rays with energies between 8keV and 25 MeV. So far, GBM spotted 31 gamma-ray bursts within its first month of operation. According to NASA, these high-energy blasts occur when massive stars die or when orbiting neutron stars spiral together and merge.

NASA decided to rename the observatory the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, in the honor of Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist who first suggested a viable mechanism for astrophysical particle acceleration, which now represents the foundation for understanding the sources studied by the telescope.

The primary objectives of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are to explore the most extreme environments in the Universe, where energies unleash beyond our imagination; search for signs of new laws of physics and what composes the Dark Matter; explain how black holes accelerate the jest of material to nearly speed of light; solve the mysteries behind the powerful gamma-ray bursts; and answer a series of questions regarding a broad range of topics, from solar flares, to pulsars and the origin of cosmic rays.