NASA to Announce Early Universe Findings Thursday

Artist's illustration of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. CREDIT: NASA View full size image

NASA is planning to announce a discovery from its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on Thursday (Nov. 1) that will shed light on the early universe, officials said.

The announcement will "discuss new measurements using gamma rays to investigate ancient starlight," NASA officials said in a statement today (Oct. 29). The findings, which will be published in the Nov. issue of the journal Science, will be revealed during a teleconference Thursday at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT).

Participants in the teleconference include:

Justin Finke, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, Washington
Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, and the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley
Volker Bromm, an associate professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin

The Fermi telescope launched in June 2008, and has been probing the sky in short-wavelength, high-energy gamma-ray light ever since. The observatory is named after Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on radioactive elements. He was a pioneer of high-energy physics, the domain of the Fermi telescope.

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