Question: Doesn’t shorter wavelengths scatter more? Does that mean that gammaray sources have to be even more luminous to reach us compared to say an infrared thingummajig at the same distance?

Quark stars baby. Quark stars. That would be utterly delightful if we could see one of those. You got your neutrons and your black holes (and all the variations thereof)- all amazing – but imagine a quark star added to the list of crazy things out there. Magnificent.

Something going through the phase of crushing down from a neutron to a quark would theoretically release a ton of gamma rays, and probably not as much visible light. Possibility, all I’m saying….

What? The Sun doesn’t emit many gamma rays when its quiet?

I thought the Sun radiated at all wavelengths constantly -maybe more actively when its well being more active sure but I didn’t know it ever stopped emitting gamma waves – does it?

What’s happening with the Sun now anyway? I heard somewhere it ain’t been going as predicted – been quieter than expected – or that we’ve just changed solar cycle but the latest is taking longer to get going properly or something like that ..

.. Could we be heading towards a new “Maunder minimum” & if do what are the likely consequences?

No, it ‘d just be dead – vapourised (or whatever you call transformed from solid straight into into energy & thus nothing sentient anyway .. wouldn’t it?

Unless gamma rays have emotions?!

Like, er… what took you so long, man?

Gamma rays have a very short wavelength. Those headed towards Earth don’t get very far before smacking into an air molecule. Maybe a couple of kilometers at most, on average.

That image is also quite amplified, too. Keep in mind that it’s the sky being photographed. Compare the image with what you see on a clear, dark night outdoors, and remember that gamma rays are much less common than visible photons.

I wonder, though, if some thought might not have been given to purposely not blocking poor old Sol in order to demonstrate what a poor gamma source it is.

At any rate, the resulting image certainly demonstrates the fact. Now we can all relax. There’s nothing to worry about.

Ooops. I think I just broke the Unspeakable Law. The law states that no matter what it is that you mention, if it’s bad it happens and if it’s good, it goes away.

Sorry. *dammit*

Does anyone walk the Plank Length? (Note: proper spelling Planck)

Is my coffee ready?

J/P=?

If they masked the sun from the image, what would they put in its place? It would be like the way our brain fills in our blind spot by blithely assuming what we would have seen in that location — it works most of the time, but it’s quite incongruous when it’s wrong. Our sun is probably covering up just more dim blue, but we don’t know that.

To mask the Sun, all you need to is remove those gamma ray hits that, at that particular time, could potentially have been from the Sun. So you’d obviously lose some signal across the Sun’s path, but not very much. At least this way you get to see the stuff along the path of the Sun.

Of course, you also need to modify the magnitude of the sky signal by the amount of time that any particular pixel was masked. But the Fermi team should already have the capacity to do this as it isn’t going to be viewing the entire sky an equal amount at all times.

I have to suspect that the failure to remove the Sun was just a matter of timing and resources, and I’d bet that they will do it in future releases. The fact that the arc is noticeable at all means that they should most definitely mask it so as not to lose information about what’s going on in the Sun’s path.

The Plank length is the shortest length we can theoretically measure in this universe. Basically, what that is saying is that we can’t even theoretically have a ruler small enough to measure anything shorter than the Plank Length. Thus we can have no idea if an energetic particle has a shorter wavelength so I would say no to your question,,,

GAry 7

Though I dunno about the gorilla analogy. Considering the havoc gamma rays play with possible mutation and extinction events, it looks more like a playful chimp to me. Slings poo most of the time, playfight often, but can rip your fingers and testicles away when really mad.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s something no one has thought of before. How cool would that be? Gamma-ray bursts — unbelievably violent explosions that occur when a black hole is born, and which could vaporize our planet without even blinking — were totally unknown until the 1960s. So who knows what’s still out there?

You get my hopes up that Fermi may give the answer to the Fermi paradox.

IIRC there is a paper that shows how even a rare and fairly local sterilizer of young and sensitive biospheres “reset and synchronize the clock” on them. Thus explaining why we own Earth instead of renting it – “where are they” as Fermi asked. GRB’s doesn’t seem to have the right properties to me, but if there are other rare but sufficiently hurtful things out there Fermi may find them?!

How cool wouldn’t that be!