Session B1: Plenary Session II

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: First Year Highlights

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly called GLAST, recently completed its first year of surveying the high-energy sky. Some key observations include: (1) Gamma-rays from pulsars appear to come from a region well above the surface of the neutron star; (2) Multiwavelength studies of blazars show that simple models of jet emission are not always adequate to explain what is seen; (3) Gamma-ray bursts can exhibit strong emission at high energies even from distant bursts; (4) Cosmic-ray electrons at energies approaching 1 TeV seem to suggest a local source for some of these particles.   

Imaging the Interstellar Wind and the Boundary of the Heliosphere in the ``Light'' of Neutral Atoms using the Interstellar Boundary Explorer

On October 19, 2008, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched with two Energetic Neutral Atom (ENA) cameras to take the first global images of the heliosphere's interaction with the interstellar medium, opening another window for astrophysics. Because the Sun moves relative to the local interstellar cloud at $\approx $26 km/s, an interstellar wind blows through our solar system, forming an ENA point source of interstellar H, He, and O atoms. At about 100 AU from the Sun the solar wind slows down to subsonic speed through interaction with the interstellar gas, forming the termination shock and accelerating ions. Through charge exchange with interstellar gas these ions form a diffuse ENA source. Both ENA sources provide complementary insight into the exciting observations by the two Voyagers during their recent termination shock passage, a heliospheric asymmetry and the absence of the source of anomalous cosmic rays at the shock. IBEX has taken its first full-sky image and discovered lunar ENAs that allowed us to determine the Moon's albedo for solar wind.