Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons^™

Stacking The Gamma-Ray Sky To Search For Faint Astrophysical Populations, Yuzhe Song

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Gamma-ray emission can be generated from a wide variety of high-energy astrophysical phenomena, from stellar flares to pulsating neutron stars, and from interstellar clouds to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Entering the 13th year of its orbit around Earth, the Fermi Space Gamma-ray Telescope has been continually surveying the γ-ray sky with its Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board. The latest Fermi source catalog contains over 6000 sources. Yet, a lot of sources that are expected to emit γ-rays are not detected, and only small percentages of some populations are detected. For example, solar flares are detected in …