Flashy and Fashionably Late: the Fascinating Time Lag in Blazar Flares
The authors of today’s featured paper investigated how a decades-long stakeout of a sample of blazars uncovered new insights into a serious case of cosmic “jet-lag”.
Future Gamma-ray Telescopes and the Search for Dark Matter
Will future gamma-ray space telescopes be able to detect gamma-rays coming from invisible dark matter halos?
Gamma-rays from the Galactic Center, a dark matter
For a few years now, excess emission of gamma-rays in the direction of the Galactic Center has puzzled scientists. In the paper we discuss today, the authors re-analyze data from the Fermi telescope to get new insights into the origin of this excess emission. They make the case for the signal being described by dark matter particles annihilating in the center of our Galaxy.
An Unexpected Guest: Fermi-LAT Sees More Novae in Gamma Rays
In 2010 the Fermi-LAT reported a surprising discovery: detection of a gamma ray transient that appeared to come from a nova, V407 Cyg. Since V407 Cyg is a special type of nova, however, it was considered a one-off event. Now two other classical novae have also been found in gamma rays.
Is the Moon polluting your gamma-ray data?
I’m going to go ahead and give away the punchline: the answer to this post’s title is, “If your source is within 8 degrees of the Moon, quite probably.” — at least according to this paper’s authors. Read on to find out why!
The first detected signature of dark matter annihilation?
A flurry of recent papers point to detection of a ~130 GeV gamma-ray emission line from near the Galactic center. If real, this could be the first detection of a signature of annihilating dark matter.