Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

A First Year View of the Galaxy with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Elizabeth Hays

GSFC

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been surveying the sky in high-energy gamma-rays for more than a year. The ground-breaking capabilities of the Large Area Telescope (LAT) enable increasingly deep coverage over a broad energy range, ~20 MeV to >300 GeV, providing answers to questions from previous satellite observations, allowing study of the brightest sources in exquisite detail, and revealing brand-new classes of GeV sources. This talk will focus on the Galactic objects detected with the LAT. Highlights include a new population of gamma-ray pulsars, gamma-ray binary systems, and the discovery of emission from a globular star cluster containing many millisecond pulsars. The firm association of GeV emission with these sources is a key step toward developing a vastly improved picture of the Galaxy in gamma rays. This has implications beyond understanding these objects individually, or more generally as a class. It also opens the way to the first studies of spatially extended GeV emission associated with supernova remnants, which have long been favored as sites of the acceleration of cosmic rays. I'll review some of the exciting first year LAT results in these areas and discuss future prospects for the ongoing mission.