"Who is there, who has not asked himself, 'What is this world around me?' Rocks, trees, people - what are the parts of which they are made, and how are these parts put together? Light, radio waves, x-rays - what are these radiations?"

A.H. Compton
 
Compton Observatory Science Highlights: Gamma-ray Bursts
  • The discovery  that gamma-ray bursts  come uniformly from all directions in the sky indicates that the bursts are not confined to our Milky Way galaxy, but are probably due to huge explosions in the distant reaches of the universe. 
  • The careful measurements of gamma-ray burst brightness has revealed that there are surprisingly few dim bursts being measured. Assuming that dimmer bursts come from further away implies that burst distribution has an outer edge. 
  • The detection of high-energy gamma rays hours after the bursts indicates some kind of lingering energetic activity must be occurring in the sources after the initial event. 
Compton Observatory Science Highlights: Diffuse Emission 
  • The mapping of the Milky Way galaxy using the 26Al isotope uncovered surprising localized enhancements in emission. This has important consequences for how chemical elements are created in our galaxy.
  • The Discovery of an extended region of electron-positron annihilation emision in the Galactic center region - the so called "Galactic Annihilation Fountain."
  • The discovery of gamma-ray line emission from the supernova remnant Cas A. This is also very important for the synthesis of elements. 
Compton Observatory Science Highlights: Compact Galactic Sources 
  • An increase in the number of detected gamma-ray pulsars from 2 to 7 - this has resulted in much greater understanding of the basic physics of these rapidly rotating neutron stars.
  • The discovery of the "Bursting Pulsar", an exotic object near the galactic center which is unlike any previously known gamma-ray emitter.
  • A large increase in the number of mysterious, unidentified gamma-ray sources both in and out of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
  • The discovery, with the help of x-ray observations, that the previously unidentified source known as Geminga is a gamma-ray pulsar. This could be an important clue to the nature of several other unidentified sources.
Compton Observatory Science Highlights: Extragalactic Sources
  • The emergence of blazar Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) - highly variable cores of distant galaxies - as a primary source of cosmic gamma rays at the highest energies.
  • Sensitive measurements of the energy distribution for another type of active galaxy known as Seyfert galaxies, which show that the production of gamma-ray photons dies out at much lower energies than previously thought. 

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  • The detection of diffuse gamma-ray emission from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy whose gamma-ray flux indicates that cosmic rays are galactic in origin - helping to solve a longstanding problem in high-energy astrophysics.

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