Solving old mysteries and making new discoveries: the discovery of gamma-ray pulsars

“The Fermi project is one of the central experiments at Stockholm University’s Oskar Klein Centre and it is gratifying that the satellite, which contains important contributions from Sweden, has already produced so many interesting results,” said Professor Lars Bergström, Director of the Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmo Particle Physics.

The gamma-ray telescope GLAST was sent into space on June 11, 2008 from Cape Canaveral. After two months the telescope was renamed Fermi, after the famous American-Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is a satellite mission for measuring high-energy gamma rays from space and it is expected to discover and study thousands of new sources of gamma radiation.

Fermi has discovered new types of astronomical objects, including a pulsar that only shines in nature’s most energy-rich light: gamma radiation. The project has also found new, exciting clues to the solution of some of the greatest mysteries in modern physics, for example the riddle of dark matter and gravitation’s quantum nature.
 
The project is an international collaboration, involving institutions from France, Italy, Japan, Sweden and USA. The satellite consists of two different instruments, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM).

The Swedish Fermi consortium, which is led by scientists from Stockholm University's Department of Physics, together with the Royal Institute of Technology and the University of Kalmar. The main area of interest for the Stockholm University group is the search for dark matter signal.

"The Fermi Telescope has […] revealed, with unprecedented detail, a very restless high-energy universe, and it is solving old mysteries while making new, unexpected discoveries,” said Astrophysicist Michael Turner, a member of Science Magazine's Senior Editorial Board, summarising the achievements of the project during the first year.

Five articles from the Fermi Project have been published in Science and in Nature so far.

Read complete article in Science Magazine:
Science Magazine: Breakthrough of the Year: The Runners-Up
Science 18 December 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5960, pp. 1600 - 1607
DOI: 10.1126/science.326.5960.1600

For more information about the Swedish particpants in Fermi:
The Swedish Fermi consortium - http://www.particle.kth.se/~tomiy/glast-sweden/index.html
Oskar Klein Centre: http://okc.albanova.se
NASA's Fermi website: http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/