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On August 27, members of the international team and NASA announced at
Tokyo Liaison Office of Hiroshima University, that the Gamma-Ray Large
Area Space Telescope (GLAST) has revealed the first complete gamma
ray picture of the sky. The team also announced the name of the
telescope to be "Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope". This name is
after Prof. Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), a pioneer in high-energy
physics, who was the first person to suggest how cosmic particles
could be accelerated to high speed.
The team published the 360 degree image of sky seen through gamma
rays as their first result from 95 hours (4 days) of observation.
The telescope was launched on June 12 at NASA Kennedy Space Center.
After having gone through series of initial tests, scientists
calibrated the gamma ray telescope and confirmed its landmark
performances.
The team is expected to publish the results of observation within
one year from the launch. The telescope will unveil highly dynamic
natures of the Universe, including signals from violent explosions
such as gamma ray bursts. In Japan, the project fund is supported
by KEK US-Japan Collaboration ("High Energy Physics") and
Grant-in-Aid (Kakenhi) by MEXT ("New Developments in Black Hole Astronomy").
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