FERMI – NASA’s Super Gamma-Ray Space Telescope – may be the next warrior on a mission to hunt down the most terrifying cosmic events, including mergers and collisions of monstrous entities in the universe.
According to SciTech Daily, a group of international astronomers has discovered FERMI’s unique capabilities. Previously, extreme cosmic events such as pulsar collisions and mergers of supermassive black holes were typically detected by radio telescopes. However, FERMI has a distinct advantage: gamma rays.
NASA’s Super Gamma-Ray Space Telescope FERMI – (Photo: NASA).
The research team, led by Dr. Aditya Parthasarathy and Dr. Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (Bonn, Germany), stated that these events typically generate a sea of gravitational waves, causing the fabric of spacetime to warp and ripple.
According to a publication in Science, astronomers have been searching for these waves for decades. However, the sea of gravitational waves is subtly altered when it reaches Earth, leading to certain inaccuracies in understanding these “monsters.”
Gamma rays from FERMI provide unexpected benefits. As the highest energy form of light, they can “see” objects that radio telescopes struggle to observe and always offer a clearer perspective.
Dr. Matthew Kerr, a physicist from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, USA) and a member of the research team, noted that FERMI has helped them capture data from over 100 pulsars to date – these are “dead” neutron stars that spin incredibly fast and with immense power.
FERMI is primarily managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy. Several countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden, have also made significant contributions to this project.
