Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

2022 News

Dec 7, 2022

NASA Missions Probe Game-Changing Cosmic Explosion

On Dec. 11, 2021, NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a blast of high-energy light from the outskirts of a galaxy around 1 billion light-years away. The event has rattled scientists' understanding of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the most powerful events in the universe.
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Dec 2, 2022

Caveats About Analyzing GRB 221009A Data

The FSSC has a created a page describing important caveats for the extraordinarily bright GRB 221009A. Fermi users should be aware of impacts on instrument performance and defined Bad Time Intervals for the LAT and GBM data before starting data analysis. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Fermi help desk at fermihelp@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov.

Oct 13, 2022

NASA's Swift, Fermi Missions Detect Exceptional Cosmic Blast

Astronomers around the world are captivated by an unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation that swept over Earth Sunday, Oct. 9. The emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) - the most powerful class of explosions in the universe - that ranks among the most luminous events known.
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Aug 10, 2022

NASA's Fermi Confirms Star Wreck as Source of Extreme Cosmic Particles

Astronomers have long sought the launch sites for some of the highest-energy protons in our galaxy. Now a study using 12 years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope confirms that one supernova remnant is just such a place.
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Jul 1, 2022

Publication of Improved GRB Localizations from Fermi-GBM

Improved localizations for gamma-ray bursts (GRB) identified with the Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor (GBM) are now available at Zenodo.org (also linked via the FSSC). They cover the time range spanning the first detection of GRBs by GBM in July 2008 through July 2019, the date when the Fermi GBM Team first implemented its improvements to automated GRB localizations. The improved localizations are more accurate with a lower systematic uncertainty, resulting in a >2x reduction in the 90% localization area for most GRBs. Please note that these localizations may differ slightly from those posted at the FSSC and in the GBM GRB catalog. The corresponding response functions and spectral fits will be updated in the forthcoming GBM catalog. These new localizations benefit both multimessenger and time-domain astrophysics analyses.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6727152

Jun 21, 2022

Fermitools 2.2.0 Released

An updated version (2.2.0) of the Fermitools is now available. This release is primarily aimed at solving problems that have made the Fermitools difficult to build and led to installation problems and lengthy installation times due to dependency resolution and dependency conflicts. These goals were primarily achieved by removing CERN's ROOT package from the Fermitools, which was the source of many of these issues. This should allow future development to proceed more quickly.An updated version (2.2.0) of the Fermitools is now available. This release is primarily aimed at solving problems that have made the Fermitools difficult to build and led to installation problems and lengthy installation times due to dependency resolution and dependency conflicts. These goals were primarily achieved by removing CERN's ROOT package from the Fermitools, which was the source of many of these issues. This should allow future development to proceed more quickly.
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May 19, 2022

Fermi Cycle-15 GI Selected Programs Announced

The stage-I selection process for the Fermi Cycle-15 Guest Investigator program has been completed. There were a total of 34 new programs selected for stage I out of 80 proposals submitted. A list of the selected programs, including the PIs, titles and abstracts is available on the FSSC web site.

Apr 15, 2022

LAT GRB Catalog Update

The Second LAT GRB catalog in HEASARC's Browse system has been updated to add LAT detected GRBs that occurred after the publication of the paper in 2018. They were analyzed using the same procedure as the original catalog. The catalog will be updated periodically with new GRBs.

Apr 7, 2022

NASA's Fermi Hunts for Gravitational Waves From Monster Black Holes

Our universe is a chaotic sea of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. Astronomers think waves from orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies are light-years long and have been trying to observe them for decades, and now they're one step closer thanks to NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
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Mar 14, 2022

Data Server Moved to Faster Hardware

On March 14 2022, the LAT data server transitioned to new hardware, which is the first major hardware update since launch. Queries should be much faster (around 6 times faster on average). The limiting factor is copying the resulting files over the GSFC network to the publicly available site where they can be downloaded. The entire LAT data set was ingested into the new server using the new routines that are more efficient. If you have a job that regularly downloads the weekly files (e.g., using rsync), it may see all the weekly files as updated and download them all again. The difference between the old and new weekly files are minor. You can see a list of differences here. If you encounter any issues, please email the FSSC's helpdesk at: fermihelp@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov.

Jan 28, 2022

Third Incremental Release of the Fourth Fermi LAT Source Catalog

We are pleased to announce that the Large Area Telescope Collaboration has released 4FGL-DR3, an incremental version of the fourth full catalog of LAT sources, based on 12 years of survey data in the 50 MeV-1 TeV energy range. In this third data release, the number of sources increased from 5787 in 4FGL-DR2 with 10 years of data to 6658 in 4FGL-DR3 with 12 years of data. The DR3 analysis fits more sources with curved spectra, it introduces a more robust spectral parametrization for pulsars, and the spectral points are extended to 1 TeV. See the DR3 paper and the 4FGL paper for the full details.

Jan 25, 2022

Fermi Cycle 15 Proposal Deadline is Approaching

The deadline for Fermi Cycle-15 Guest Investigator proposals is fast approaching: Feb 17, 2022, 16:30 EST. To help you in preparing your proposals, the Fermi Science Support Center will host a virtual workshop on Jan. 28, at 13:00 EST. We will provide information on proposal submission and evaluation processes, as well as the latest news on Fermi.