Astronomers have detected gamma rays on a gravitational lens, or a natural telescope that is made when a rare cosmic alignment allows a body's gravity to bend and strengthen light at a distance via NASA's Fermi observatory according to information in a news release from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The feat presents new opportunities for astronomers in researching ways to examine black holes, and additional gravitational lenses using information from Fermi's Gamma-ray Space Telescope the press release reported.
"We began thinking about the possibility of making this observation a couple of years after Fermi launched, and all of the pieces finally came together in late 2012," Teddy Cheung, lead scientist for the finding and an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington said in a statement the news release reported.
"One light path is slightly longer than the other, so when we detect flares in one image we can try to catch them days later when they replay in the other image," Jeff Scargle, an astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif said in the release.
"Over the course of a day, one of these flares can brighten the blazar by 10 times in gamma rays but only 10 percent in visible light and radio, which tells us that the region emitting gamma rays is very small compared to those emitting at lower energies," Stefan Larsson, an astrophysicist at Stockholm University in Sweden said in the release.
Monday's discovery was provoked when Fermi's large area telescope discovered several gamma-ray flares via an authority B0218+357 in Sept. 2012, 4.35 billion light years away from the Earth, and towards the constellation Triangulum the release reported.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Control's NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telecope, which was made jointly with the United States Department of Energy the press release reported. Various academic institutions also lent a hand. Associates in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and United States also helped.
