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Thousands of years ago, when people were looking at the night sky, they named constellations based on their world and their mythology. You have, for example, Andromeda, Leo (the lion) and Hercules, all from Greek culture. But how to name the constellations in today's culture? NASA did just that, and here's what they found.
Image credits: NASA.
Among the new constellations, there are many favorites of modern culture: from the Little Prince to Enterprise Star Trek, through Godzilla with its heat ray, and TARDIS, a card game in time, War Who. The Hulk, a product of a gamma-ray experiment gone awry, and Schrodinger's cat are also shown.
The constellation collection was released to celebrate NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which has been in operation for 10 years.
"Developing these unofficial constellations was a fun way to celebrate a decade of Fermi achievements," said Julie McEnery, chief scientist of the Fermi project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "In one way or another, all gamma-ray constellations are related to Fermi science.
Since 2018, the Fermi telescope has been monitoring the night sky, probing dark matter, studying the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts, and looking for black microholes, among other objectives. Essentially anything that has gamma radiation can be studied to some extent by the telescope. Constellations are only a secondary bonus. The official telescope page reads as follows:
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"The Universe is home to many exotic and beautiful phenomena, some of which can generate almost inconceivable amounts of energy. Supermassive black holes, fusion of neutron stars, hot gas streams moving almost at the speed of light … are just some of the wonders generating gamma radiation, the most energetic form of radiation, billions of times more energetic than the type of light visible to our eyes. "
Fermi has been a historic success, said Elizabeth Ferrara of NASA, head of the Constellation project. The number of sources mapped by Fermi had increased to 3,000 by 2015, 10 times the number known before the mission.
If you want to explore all the constellations, you're in luck: Ferrara and Daniel Kocevski, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, have developed an interactive web-based tool to introduce constellations.
The interactive website features stunning works by Sonoma State University illustrator Aurore Simonnet and a map of Fermi's entire gamma sky.
Although the original design takes into account a five-year lifespan (with a ten-year operating goal), the telescope is still working as smoothly as ever and we can probably expect a lot more.
"Fermi continues to work well and we are now preparing a new LAT all sky catalog," said Jean Ballet, a member of the Fermi team of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Saclay. "That will add about 2,000 sources, whose brightness varies a lot, enriching these constellations and animating the sky with high energy!"
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