Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Apr 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002aps..apr2a3001k&link_type=abstract
American Physical Society, April Meeting, Jointly Sponsored with the High Energy Astrophysics Division (HEAD) of the American As
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
The history of observational high-energy gamma-ray astronomy began in the late 1950's and early 1960's with a series of simple instruments flown on high altitude scientific balloons and satellites. The experiments were hopelessly inadequate in sensitivity and high in background for observing the very weak flux of gamma-rays in an environment rich in cosmic rays. Progress has been slow, and has closely followed technological developments that allow these weaknesses to be overcome. The key development was to place large instruments on orbiting platforms, well above the Earth's atmosphere. While two small spark chamber tracking detectors placed on orbit on small satellites in the 1970's by NASA (SAS-2) and ESA (COS-B) gave a glimpse of the promise of studies of this radiation, it was NASA's second Great Observatory, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, that truly opened the window of gamma-ray astronomy for exploration in 1991. The high energy instrument on CGRO, EGRET, examined the region from 30 MeV to about 10 GeV, expanding the catalog of known high-energy gamma-ray sources from 25 to 471. Over 70 of these are AGN's, characterized by high time variability on time scales from hours to days and weeks. The other major class of sources is pulsars, but only six have been studied and, as a class, they are much more stable. The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, GLAST, scheduled for launch in 2006, promises to open the high-energy gamma-ray regime to full astronomical investigation. It is a demonstration of the paradigm that progress in high-energy gamma-ray astronomy has, more than any other space enterprise, been paced by the development of technologies to enable these very difficult observations. With this major advance in capability comes a union of particle physicists and astrophysicists to expand the horizons of both. Leaning heavily on the detector technologies of accelerator physics experiments, this venture with the combined efforts of NASA, the US. Department of Energy and foreign partners from Italy, France, Japan, Sweden, and Germany promises a new era in which gamma-ray astronomy takes its place as a full observational astronomy and a new frontier for the study of physics at energies not achievable in Earth-based facilities. The mission will also provide unprecedented spectral coverage for probing the origin of cosmic gamma-ray bursts. This talk will summarize how we reached this exciting era of observationa gamma-ray astronomy and what it might mean as we are finally able to exploit this relatively poorly explored window to our Universe.
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