[Music throughout] My name is Judy Racusin.
I'm the deputy project scientist on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
I'm here today to watch a video with you of observations
collected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope, or the LAT.
It surveys the entire sky every few hours.
This allows it to do a lot of really cool things.
It can look at sources that vary on timescales
from a fraction of a second to years on end.
There's a thin band across the middle of the image,
and that's the Milky Way.
The color scheme, blue, red, yellow.
This is just a way for us to visualize it because our eyes don't see gamma rays.
Fermi isn't an imaging instrument like you think of Hubble or Webb.
What it is is it's actually a photon collecting instrument.
It's a particle detector in space.
And we make these maps by adding up all of the photons we collect.
Those circular sources that you see in the galactic plane
are actually individual objects.
Most of those are pulsars.
We see sources above and below
the galactic plane. Those are largely blazars.
What that is, is a supermassive black hole, millions to billions of times
the mass of our Sun, the center of a galaxy that is active.
That means that there's gas and stars falling into it,
and it produces jets of emission And they're very chaotic systems.
This video
showing the first 14 years of Fermi observations is just the beginning.
Fermi continues to observe the dynamic sky every day,
and we hope it'll continue to do so for many years into the future.
NASA