GLASTcast Episode 1: What is GLAST?

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GLASTcast Episode 1: What is GLAST?
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Steve Ritz: If you look up at the sky at night it seems very placid and almost unchanging. Not true in gamma rays and not true in space. Things are changing all the time.

Peter Michaelson: When you look at the gamma ray sky you realize that there are violent phenomena in the universe.

Diego Torres (subtitled): Studying gamma rays is a window to these phenomena. GLAST is the first mission that will observe photons in the last range of the electromagnetic spectrum left to be observed.

Steve Ritz: We’re looking at the universe from a completely different perspective. We actually look at it through gamma rays which is another from of light or it’s the same thing as the light we see with our own eyes except that the light itself is literally tens of billions of times more energetic.

Neil Gehrels: Objects in the universe put out energy all across the electromagnetic spectrum and to really understand how the universe was formed, how it’s evolving, how the objects in it function, we need to observe over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Dave Thompson: GLAST is gamma ray telescopes, two of them, designed to study the highest energy photons in the universe.

Neil Gehrels: And there are some mind-boggling things that we might find in this area.

Luke Drury: GLAST will tell us things about active galactic nuclei

Valerie Connaughton: pulsars

Martin Pohl: supermassive black holes

Dave Thompson: gamma ray bursts

Luke Drury: possibly about dark matter, a whole range of issues which are important to modern physics.

Per Carlson (subtitled): It is exactly like finding yourself in a dark room and then you open a window to something grand that is outside and GLAST will be the same way. You open a window and you will discover new things.

Chip Meegan: Every time you open-up a new window to the universe, a new wavelength region, you discover new things.

Alan Marscher: And usually the universe has many surprises in store for us.

Julie McEnery: There’s a lot of major discoveries waiting to be made.

Dave Thompson: And we’re going to learn lots more with GLAST.

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