New phenomenon: An artist's concept of the newly discovered pulsar. Clouds of charged particles move along the pulsar's magnetic field lines (blue) and create a lighthouse-like beam of gamma rays (purple).
Credit: NASA
Fermi's Large Area Telescope scans the entire sky every three hours and detects photons with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion times the energy of visible light.
"The Large Area Telescope provides us with a unique probe of the galaxy's pulsar population, revealing objects we would not otherwise even know exist," said Fermi project scientist Steve Ritz of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Alabama, USA.
"This observation shows the power of the Large Area Telescope," Michelson adds. "It is so sensitive that we can now discover new types of objects just by observing their gamma-ray emissions."
With NASA.
