AAS: Fermi Sees Sky Teeming with Gamma Rays

NASA’s Fermi telescope has discovered 12 previously unseen pulsars — the tip of the iceberg, researchers say — and has the potential to unlock new secrets of supernova explosions.

The Fermi/LAT collaboration announced the discovery of 12 pulsars on Tuesday that have never been observed before, along with 17 that were previously identified by their radio waves.

In addition, the mission has detected six so-called millisecond radio pulsars, a new class of extended-life pulsars which rotate at breakneck paces after gobbling up their aging companion stars, and can live a billion years or more.

Normal pulsars last only a million years or so after a high mass star explodes into a supernova, and spawns them.

A total of 1800 pulsars had previously been discovered by their radio emissions, but gamma rays are turning out to be much more revealing, said Fermi/LAT collaborator and Stanford physicist Roger Romani.

“The radio is just a slide show. We’re looking at objects that are vastly more powerful” than their radio emissions alone had shown, he said.

Romani and Fermi team member Alice Harding, a theorist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, presented the new findings at a press conference as part of the 213th American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California.

Harding said Fermi, formerly known as the GLAST mission, has dramatically outpaced their expectations.

“We predicted we’d see this many gamma ray pulsars after a year, or several years. We saw CTA-1 in the first light data,” she said, referring to Fermi’s very first gamma-ray only pulsar, announced in October.

“It looks like everywhere were looking, we see pulsars,” Harding added. “It’s cool.”