Daniel Kocevski (ST12) has worked with an international team of astronomers to generate a new animation showing the gamma-ray sky’s frenzied activity during a year of observations by NASA’s Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) from February 2022 to February 2023. In the animation, each frame represents three days of observations, with each object growing and shrinking as it brightens and dim over time. Over 90% of the sources in the dataset are blazars, central regions of galaxies hosting active supermassive black holes that produce powerful particle jets pointed almost directly at Earth. The animation utilizes data from a new publicly available database developed by Kocevski called the Fermi LAT Light Curve Repository, which contains light curves for over 1500 variable gamma-ray sources observed by Fermi LAT and is intended to serve as an ongoing resource to the time-domain and multi-messenger communities.The new animation can be accessed here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/nasa-s-fermi-captures-dynamic-gamma-ray-sky-in-new-animation/.
