Brightest-ever Flare From Blazar 3C 454.3
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- Written by:
- Francis Reddy
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The blazar 3C 454.3, which lies 7.2 billion light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, underwent a series of intense flares in the fall of 2009. By December, it had become the brightest persistent gamma-ray source in the sky — more than ten times brighter than it was in the summer. These all-sky images, which record the numbers of high-energy gamma-rays captured by Fermi's Large Area Telescope on Dec. 3 and Nov. 18, clearly show the change. Typically, the Vela pulsar, which lies only 1,000 light-years away, is the sky's brightest persistent source of gamma rays. Blazar 3C 454.3, which is millions of times farther away, rose to twice Vela's brightness. Astronomers suspect the activity is driven by some change within the galaxy's black-hole-powered particle jet, but they do not understand the details.
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Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
Goddard Space Flight Center
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Animators
- Benoit Lott (CENBG)
- Stefano Ciprini (INFN)
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Graphics
- Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
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Science writer
- Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park) [Lead]
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Video editor
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
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Scientist
- Julie McEnery (NASA/GSFC)
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Producer
- Scott Wiessinger (KBR Wyle Services, LLC)
Missions
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This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
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Fermi
ID: 216Fermi Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Large Area Telescope (LAT)
This dataset can be found at: http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov
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Fermi
ID: 687
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related Pages
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ID: 10819 Produced Video
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