by ScienceAtNASA
March 15, 2012

from YouTube Website
 

NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope is finding hundreds of new objects at the very edge of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Many of them have one thing in common:

Astronomers have no idea what they are.

Fermi is picking up crazy charged particles via electromagnetic waves - and it’s detecting so many of them Fermi has been able to produce the first all-sky map of the very high energy universe.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is a space observatory being used to perform gamma-ray astronomy observations from low Earth orbit.

Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), with which astronomers mostly intend to perform an all-sky survey studying astrophysical and cosmological phenomena such as active galactic nuclei, pulsars, other high-energy sources and dark matter.

When asked what is the origin of these new found charged particles, and where do they come from?

Dave Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center gave us his answer.

“It’s a mystery, for one thing. About a third of the new sources can’t be clearly linked to any of the known types of objects that produce gamma rays. We have no idea what they are. The other two-thirds have one thing in common - astounding energy.”

Strange radiation streaming from the core of our Milky Way galaxy may be a long-sought signal of dark matter, the elusive stuff thought to make up much of the universe.

The charged particles cannot be explained by the structural mechanisms in the galaxy, and it cannot be charged particles from supernova explosions.

It is believed this could be proof of dark matter - otherwise, we have discovered an absolutely new (and unknown) mechanism of acceleration of particles in the galactic center.

Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to find evidence our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded in an enormous halo of charged particles that extends for hundreds of thousands of light years.

The estimated mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of all the stars in the galaxy.

Caught up in a spiraling flow are magnetic fields, which accelerate hot material along powerful beams above the accretion disk. The resulting high-speed jet, launched by the black hole and the disk, shoots out across the galaxy, extending for hundreds of thousands of light-years.

These jets can influence many galactic processes, of which is still to be determined.

Video
 

Mysterious Objects

...at The Edge of The Electromagnetic Spectrum