Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: High-Energy Results from the First Year

Understand

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi) was launched on June 11, 2008 and began its first year sky survey on August 11, 2008.

• The Large Area Telescope (LAT), a wide field-of-view pair-conversion telescope covering the energy range from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV, is the primary instrument on Fermi.
• While this review focuses on results obtained with the LAT, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) complements the LAT in its observations of transient sources and is sensitive to X-rays and gamma-rays with energies between 8 keV and 40 MeV.
• During the first year in orbit, the Fermi LAT has observed a large number of sources that include active galaxies, pulsars, compact binaries, globular clusters, supernova remnants, as well as the Sun, the Moon and the Earth.