WEBVTT FILE

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[Music throughout]
My name is Judy Racusin.

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I'm the deputy project scientist
on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

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I'm here today to watch a video with
you of observations

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collected by the Fermi Large Area
Telescope, or the LAT.

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It surveys the entire sky
every few hours.

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This allows it to do a lot
of really cool things.

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It can look at sources
that vary on timescales

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from a fraction of a second
to years on end.

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There's a thin band
across the middle of the image,

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and that's the Milky Way.

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The color scheme, blue, red, yellow.

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This is just a way for us to visualize it
because our eyes don't see gamma rays.

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Fermi isn't an imaging instrument
like you think of Hubble or Webb.

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What it is is it's actually a photon
collecting instrument.

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It's a particle detector in space.

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And we make these maps
by adding up all of the photons we collect.

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Those circular sources that you see in
the galactic plane

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are actually individual objects.

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Most of those are pulsars.

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We see sources above and below

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the galactic plane.
Those are largely blazars.

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What that is, is a supermassive black
hole, millions to billions of times

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the mass of our Sun,
the center of a galaxy that is active.

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That means that there's gas and stars
falling into it,

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and it produces jets of emission
And they're very chaotic systems.

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This video

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showing the first 14 years of Fermi
observations is just the beginning.

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Fermi continues to observe
the dynamic sky every day,

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and we hope it'll continue to do so
for many years into the future.

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NASA