Using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other facilities, an international team of scientists has found the first gamma-ray binary in another galaxy and the most luminous one ever seen. The dual-star system, dubbed LMC P3, contains a massive star and a crushed stellar core that interact to produce a cyclic flood of gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.
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The FSSC is pleased to announce the availability of a version of the Fermi Science Tools that can be built from source on OS X 15.6 (el Capitan). This release is *only* for users with problems using the binary version of the tools on el Capitan. Users should be aware that this version of the tools does not support the ROOT or gtburst software.
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, the results are helping scientists rule out some of the many theoretical possibilities. Three studies published earlier this year, using six or more years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, have broadened the mission's dark matter hunt using some novel approaches.
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The Fermi Cycle-9 stage-I proposal selection process has now been completed. A list of the selected proposals is now available. Notification letters will be sent in the near future.
In April, the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team announced the discovery of a weak gamma-ray burst that may be associated with the recent LIGO discovery of gravitational waves from a black hole merger, an event known as GW150914. The team notes that Fermi observations associated with future LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detections are needed to reveal whether this weak burst is a plausible counterpart or a chance coincidence. The NASA Fermi team stands behind this finding, which has successfully passed through the scientific review process and is awaiting publication in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
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Nearly 10 billion years ago, the black hole at the center of a galaxy known as PKS B1424-418 produced a powerful outburst. Light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Now astronomers using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other space- and ground-based observatories have shown that a record-breaking neutrino seen around the same time likely was born in the same event.
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Two new online services have recently been added to the FSSC web site. The Fermi All-sky Variability Analysis (FAVA) employs a photometric technique to identify flaring sources in the Fermi LAT data and also offers a capability to for end users to compute light curves for any point on the sky for user specified time intervals. A second facility, maintained by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, provides a tabulation of candidate Untriggered GBM Short GRB Candidates. With the graphical and textual information provided, users can easily obtain the digital data from the FSSC data archive and perform their own detailed analyses.
On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.
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As a result of improved analysis and operating modes, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is detecting Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes at a rate of more than 800 per year. The second GBM catalog of TGFs, composed of 3356 TGFs detected from July 11 2008 through June 23 2015, has just been released on the Fermi Science Support Center.
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Major improvements to methods used to process observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have yielded an expanded, higher-quality set of data that allows astronomers to produce the most detailed census of the sky yet made at extreme energies.
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Proposals to participate in the Fermi Cycle-9 Guest Investigator Program are due by 16:30 EST January 22, 2016. For additional details and instructions on how to propose please refer to the Proposals page of the FSSC web site and to the Fermi appendix (D.6) to the 2015 ROSES NRA which is hosted by the NSPIRES web facility. We strongly encourage prospective proposers who have not already done so to review these documents prior to preparing their proposals.