The team suggests that light from this
gamma-ray burst passed through an unusually dusty part of its galaxy, where a series of supernovas had enriched the surrounding space with dust grains.
The
gamma-ray burst, called GRB 060218, lasted almost 2,000 seconds, which is about 100 times as long as a typical burst.
The array was used to perform measurements of asymmetries in neutron capture in
gamma-ray emission following capture of [.sup.10]B and [.sup.27]Al.
The entire
gamma-ray astronomy community is currently preparing HESS's successor, the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a planned observatory that will be even more sensitive and based at two sites, one in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern hemisphere.
Data from the planned Cherenkov Telescope Array, a ground-based
gamma-ray observatory, and scheduled upgrades to the DESY ALPS particle-physics experiment in Germany, could reveal if photons do change their stripes.
Tavani's team has used the Italian Space Agency's AGILE spacecraft to monitor
gamma-ray emissions from Cygnus X-3 for the past two years.
"One day 3C 279 was just one of many active galaxies we see, and the next day it was the brightest thing in the
gamma-ray sky," said Sara Cutini, a Fermi Large Area Telescope scientist at the Italian Space Agency's Science Data Center in Rome.
These exploding stars use all of their energy to emit one last strong beam of highly energetic radiation - known as a
gamma-ray burst - before they die.
NASA's Fermi
Gamma-ray Space Telescope is watching some of the most extreme phenomena in the distant universe, but little did the Fermi team expect it to be hit from below.
The finding, which has revealed a new class of galactic
gamma-ray sources, is not unexpected.
TEHRAN (FNA)- An international team of astronomers, using NASA's Fermi observatory, has made the first-ever
gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source.
