Gamma Ray Creation

  • Released Friday, September 7th, 2007
  • Updated Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023 at 1:55PM
  • ID: 20113

Gamma rays are the highest-energy forms of light in the electromagnetic spectrum and they can have over a billion times the energy of the type of light visible to the human eye. Gamma rays can be created in several different ways: a high-energy particle can collide with another particle, a particle can collide and annihilate with its anti-particle, an element can undergo radioactive decay, or a charged particle can be accelerated. In this animation, we see a high-energy photon collide with a free electron, which causes the creation of a gamma-ray.

This animation shows a high-energy photon (blue coil) colliding with a free electron (red ball), which causes the release of a gamma-ray (purple flash).

For More Information

See http://www.nasa.gov/GLAST

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series:

Datasets used in this visualization

Fermi (Collected with the LAT sensor)
Event List

Fermi Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) Large Area Telescope (LAT)

Dataset can be found at: http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov

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