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Fermi's Five-year View of the Gamma-ray Sky Released on August 21, 2013 Share on facebook Share on twitter More Sharing Services This all-sky view shows how the sky appears at energies greater than 1 billion electron volts (GeV) according to five years of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. (For comparison, the energy of visible light is between 2 and 3 electron volts.) The image contains 60 months of data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope; for better angular resolution, the map shows only gamma rays converted at the front of the instrument's tracker. Brighter colors indicate brighter gamma-ray sources. The map is shown in galactic coordinates, which places the midplane of our galaxy along the center.

The Fermi LAT 60-month image, constructed from front-converting gamma rays with energies greater than 1 GeV. The most prominent feature is the bright band of diffuse glow along the map's center, which marks the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy. The gamma rays are mostly produced when energetic particles accelerated in the shock waves of supernova remnants collide with gas atoms and even light between the stars. Equidistant cylindrical projection.