Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
arXiv:2210.12875 · doi:10.1007/978-981-16-4544-0_58-1
Abstract
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a key mission in multiwavelength and multimessenger studies, has been surveying the gamma-ray sky from its low-Earth orbit since 2008. Its two scientific instruments, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) and the Large Area Telescope (LAT), cover 8 orders of magnitude in photon energy. The GBM consists of 12 Sodium Iodide detectors and 2 Bismuth Germinate detectors, covering the 10 keV - 40 MeV energy range, arrayed on two sides of the spacecraft so as to view the entire sky that is not occulted by the Earth. The LAT is a pair production telescope based on silicon strip trackers, a Cesium Iodide calorimeter, and a plastic scintillator anticoincidence system. It covers the energy range from about 20 MeV to more than 500 GeV, with a field of view of about 2.4 steradians. Thanks to their huge fields of view, the instruments can observe the entire sky with a cadence of about an hour for GBM and about three hours for LAT. All gamma-ray data from Fermi become public immediately, enabling a broad range of multiwavelength and multimessenger research. Over 3000 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), including GRB 170817A associated with a neutron star merger detected in gravitational waves, and 5000 high-energy sources, including the blazar TXS 0506+056 associated with high-energy neutrinos, have been detected by the Fermi instruments. The Fermi Science Support Center provides a wide array of resources to enable scientific use of the data, including background models, source catalogs, analysis software, documentation, and a Help Desk.
36 pages, 13 figures. To appear in "Handbook of X-ray and Gamma-ray Astrophysics" by Springer - Editors in chief: C. Bambi and A. Santangelo
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- The Fermi GBM Gamma-Ray Burst Spectral Catalog: 10 Years of Data
- A bright gamma-ray flare interpreted as a giant magnetar flare in NGC 253
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- A Nova Outburst Powered by Shocks
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- The Five Year Fermi/GBM Magnetar Burst Catalog
- Rapid Spectral Variability of a Giant Flare from a Magnetar in NGC 253
- Fermi Large Area Telescope Performance After 10 Years Of Operation
- Simulating the Fermi Bubbles as Forward Shocks Driven by AGN Jets
- FAST discovery of an extremely radio-faint millisecond pulsar from the Fermi-LAT unassociated source 3FGL J0318.1+0252
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