The Universe is populated by a variety of galaxy-types; a sampling is shown in this Hubble image of Abell Cluster S0740. Gamma-ray bursts prefer some and avoid others.
This week, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) symposium is being held in Huntsville, Alabama, hosted by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST) Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team. Regular readers of symmetry will have heard plenty about the FGST mission, a joint project of NASA, the US Department of Energy, and other international partners, but we have focused more on the Large Area Telescope (LAT), the primary instrument aboard FGST.
The GBM is the secondary instrument, capable of viewing the whole sky at once, and able to detect the direction of sudden gamma-ray bursts, albeit with low resolution. That information can be used to then tell the Telescope to reorient within a matter of minutes to point the LAT at the gamma-ray source for more detailed study.
In combination, these two instruments provide a fantastic new tool for understanding gamma-ray sources throughout the cosmos. Recent results from the LAT have shown its potential to uncover a whole new class of sources, gamma-ray-only pulsars, which LAT team members tell me could make up the majority of those objects currently listed as "unknown" in previous gamma-ray surveys of the sky.
One new result presented at the GRB symposium concerns the kinds of galaxies that tend to be home to gamma-ray bursts. Dauna Coulter has an excellent treatment of the topic, so hop on over to a NASA Web feature about the new results.
