NASA's new "gamma" constellations are partially made from black holes (and TARDIS)

You would think that with all the astronomical discoveries we have made over the years, we would have a lot of stars to create new constellations. Like, thousands of them. And in a way, we do it. But why use old boring stars, while you can use black holes instead?

To celebrate the hard work of the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope and the international team involved in the discoveries that it has made since 2008, NASA has developed an "unofficial set of .. "constellations", composed of the telescope detected gamma ray bursts (GRB)

Rather than using animals or gods to delineate the constellations, NASA is inspired by modern pop culture. For example, here is the TARDIS of Doctor Who's fame.

And the USS Enterprise because how not to create new constellations and not involve Star Trek in one way or another?

Now, not all GRBs come from black holes. – in particular, the super-mbadive at the center of other galaxies – as explained by NASA:

The individual points of gamma light in the Fermi constellations are usually not stars. About half of them are distant galaxies powered by monster black holes. These objects, called blazars, produce gamma rays that are heading in our direction.

Other sources include rapidly rotating neutron stars called pulsars, binary star systems containing neutron stars, exploding stars' clouds and normal galaxies. like our own Milky Way.

More fascinating yet, about 30% of detections are "unrecognized at another wavelength", which basically means that we have no idea what they are: [19659006] An interesting possibility is that some of these unknown sources may contain new types of objects emitting gamma rays. Fermi has already offered our best gaze to the gamma sky, but his mission continues to delve deeper into the extreme cosmos.

Do not quote me on this, but I imagine that they are neither Doctor Who nor Captain. Kirk.

[NASA, via Syfy]