HEADNEWS: THE ELECTRONIC NEWSLETTER OF THE
HIGH ENERGY ASTROPHYSICS DIVISION OF THE AAS
Newsletter No. 99, December 2011
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7. Fermi Mission News
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Julie McEnery (GSFC), Chris Shrader (GSFC), Dave Thompson (GSFC),
Liz Hays (GSFC) & Lynn Cominsky (Sonoma State)
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope continues to operate nominally.
Some highlights:
* The Second LAT source catalog (2FGL), with 1873 sources, was released and is available from the Fermi Science Support Center at http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/
(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/gamma-ray-census.html)
* The Second LAT AGN Catalog (2LAC) is available at
http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1420
* The number of gamma-ray pulsars now exceeds 100, including a relatively young millisecond gamma-ray pulsar in a globular cluster
(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/young-pulsar.html)
* Fermi and Swift are co-sponsoring a Gamma-ray Burst Symposium in May, 2012
(http://www.mpe.mpg.de/events/GRB2012/)
* The Fourth International Fermi Symposium will be held in Monterey, California, October 28 - November 2, 2012
(http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/mtgs/symposia/2012/)
Data and Software Releases
A new Fermi LAT data release, Pass 7, is now available, along with revised LAT instrument response functions (IRFs), incorporating improved background rejection and event quality selections providing improved performance at low energy. Improved Galactic and isotropic emission models were released concurrently.
Fermi Guest Investigator Program
Cycle 5 Fermi Guest Investigator Proposals will be due on January 20, 2012. (http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/ssc/proposals/). New for Cycle-5: additional LAT data products, which provide significant new analysis capabilities for short duration transients such as gamma-ray bursts and solar flares, will be available. These provide enhanced acceptance especially at low energies but with high background contamination. These data and associated response files will be provided for a time interval around each transient event. Also, the Suzaku observation time available through the joint Fermi-Suzaku program has been increased.
Fermi E/PO News
The most recent Fermi gamma-ray pulsar discoveries that were announced (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/young-pulsar.html ) used Einstein@Home. This is a citizen-science project (originally designed to detect gravitational waves from LIGO) that can run on your computer when it would otherwise be idle. To download and install on your computer, see: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
An interactive pulsar explorer, featuring Fermi's first 100+ pulsars is also part of this press release. To run it directly, see: http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/fermipulsar/
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