Credit:IBIS Survey Team
Cataloguing the GR Sky
The INTEGRAL Gamma-Ray observatory has just released an important new survey of the Universe taken by its high resolution imaging detector called IBIS. This survey detected 421 extraordinary objects distributed on the sky, as shown in the image above. In this image different types of sources are labelled with different colors. These objects are mainly powered by extreme gravity; objects like neutron stars and black holes in our Galaxy, which form the low-mass X-ray binaries and the high mass X-ray binaries, along with supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) beyond the Milky Way.
The image at the bottom is a soft gamma-ray/hard X-ray color image of the central region of the Milky Way: red objects primarily emit at energies below 30 keV while blue objects emit at energies above 40 keV.
About 75% of the sources detected in this IBIS survey can be associated with known objects; about 25% of these sources, however, are unidentified. What could these mystery objects be?
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 26-Feb-2024 17:33:47 EST
