Credit: ESA; Courtesy by Jerome Rodriguez, Angela Bazzano and the IBIS team
The Hard Plane
The
INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, or INTEGRAL, is rapidly becoming an "integral" tool for astrophysicists since its launch last October. INTEGRAL is an ESA mission with participation by the US and Russia, and one of its "core programs" is to obtain scans of the disk of the Milky Way to map its gamma-ray emission, to discover unknown persistent sources (like recent Galactic supernovae or black holes) and find transient sources. The first results of this program can be seen in the image above, which represents a mosaic of 11 galactic plane scans obtained by the
IBIS/ISGRI imager in the hard X-ray energy band (15-40 kilo electron volts). Known sources which were detected in these scans are labelled in green.
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified February 13, 2003
