The Gamma Ray Sky

What if you could see gamma rays ? If you could, the sky would seem to be filled with a shimmering high-energy glow from the most exotic and mysterious objects in the Universe. In the early 1990s NASA's orbiting Compton Observatory , produced this premier vista of the entire sky in gamma rays , photons with more than 40 million times the energy of visible light . The diffuse gamma-ray glow from the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs horizontally through the false-color image. The brightest spots in the galactic plane (right of center) are pulsars , spinning magnetized neutron stars formed in the violent crucibles of stellar explosions . Above and below the plane, quasars , believed to be powered by supermassive black holes, produce gamma-ray beacons at the edges of the universe. The nature of many of the fainter sources remains unknown .