This is how spectacular the image of the universe would be if we could observe gamma rays

The new animation captured for a year, in gamma-ray vision, the dynamic spectacle of the universe’s cosmic ‘fireworks’.

An international team of astronomers created an animation showing the explosive and fleeting manifestation of gamma rays in the universe from February 2022 to February 2023. The scientists used the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. This instrument scans the entire sky every three hours and detects gamma rays with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion electron volts.

“In putting together this database, we were inspired by astronomers who study galaxies and wanted to compare the visible and gamma-ray light curves over long time scales,” said Daniel Kocevski, a NASA astrophysicist and co-author of the study. “We get requests to process one object at a time. Now the scientific community has access to all the data analyzed from the entire catalogFor her part, co-author Michela Negro, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, argues that having the “historical light curve database could lead to new insights into multiple messages about past events.”

In the animation, each frame represents three days of observations. The magenta circle for each object grows larger as it gets brighter and shrinks as it gets darker. Some objects fluctuate throughout the year. The reddish-orange band running through the center is the central plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way.. Lighter colors in the band indicate a more intense glow. The yellow circle shows the apparent annual path of the Sun across the sky. The results of the work were published last Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal.