New Space Telescope GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) is going to explore the birth of the universe. Read this quote from the mission page at Stanford University (http://www-glast.stanford.edu/mission.html)
The key scientific objectives of the GLAST mission are:
- To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in AGNs, pulsars, and SNRs. This understanding is a key to solving the mysteries of the formation of jets, the extraction of rotational energy from spinning neutron stars, and the dynamics of shocks in SNRs.
- Resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emission.Interstellar emission from the Milky Way and a large number of unidentified sources are prominent features of the gamma-ray sky.
- Determine the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts and transients. Variability has long been a powerful method to decipher the workings of objects in the Universe on all scales. Variability is a central feature of the gamma-ray sky.
- Probe dark matter and early Universe. Observations of gamma-ray AGN serve to probe supermassive black holes through jet formation and evolution studies, and provide constraints on the star-formation rate at early epochs through photon-photon absorption over extragalactic distances. There are also the possibilities of observing monoenergetic gamma-ray “lines” above 30 GeV from supersymmetric dark matter interaction; detecting decays of relics from the very early Universe, such as cosmic strings or evaporating primordial black holes; or even using gamma-ray bursts to detect quantum gravity effects.
Video about GLAST:
