Jan 07 2014
A Gravitational Lens
The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope web site has an article about gravitational lensing by “a face-on spiral galaxy – one very much like our own – about 4 billion light years away.” * This has been written about by a number of news sources, and I first found it on Google News.
A comment that comes from Stefan Larsson, an astrophysicist at Stockholm University in Sweden, is:
“Over the course of a day, one of these flares can brighten the blazar by 10 times in gamma rays but only 10 percent in visible light and radio, which tells us that the region emitting gamma rays is very small compared to those emitting at lower energies.”
Gamma rays at and near 312.76 MeV would be the most abundant of all light rays in the universe. Coming from all atomic and molecular mass in the universe, they would be of the highest emission and absorption. There is a much greater flux density of gamma rays coming from concentrated volumes of these types of mass than the scientific community currently expects.
The article appears to say that the data was taken by the LAT, not the GBM. With the lensing being discussed, what we have is a lot of gravity bending gravity.