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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker: Francesco Longo (INFN-Trieste, I)

Title: The Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope Status, Early Results and Prospects

Date: Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
Time: 12:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni

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Abstract:
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope is a satellite-based observatory that will study the gamma-ray sky in a wide energy range from a few keV to 300 GeV, allowing the investigation of many fields of the gamma ray astrophysics. Fermi will open a new and important window on a wide variety of phenomena, including black holes and active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts, the origin of cosmic rays and supernova remnants and searches for hypothetical new phenomena such as supersymmetric dark matter annihilations. Fermi was launched in June 2008 from Kennedy Space Flight Centre (NASA). The primary instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), which measures gamma-ray flux and spectra from 20 MeV to > 300 GeV and is a successor to the highly successful EGRET experiment on CGRO and the Italian space Agency Small Mission AGILE. The LAT has better angular resolution, greater effective area, wider field of view and broader energy coverage with respect to EGRET. In an early phase of the Fermi operations, a series of calibrations and performance measurements and monitoring will be performed and first sky images were collected. In this talk a review of the Fermi physics and the first sky images and early results will be presented.
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contact: Massimo Persic (OATS)