The Fabric of Space-Time

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, formerly GLAST, will open this high-energy world to exploration and help us to answer these questions. With Fermi, astronomers will at long last have a superior tool to study how black holes, notorious for pulling matter in, can accelerate jets of gas outward at fantastic speeds. Physicists will be able to study subatomic particles at energies far greater th More..an those seen in ground-based particle accelerators. And cosmologists will gain valuable information about the birth and early evolution of the Universe. Light, we all know it travels at well, the speed of light, or does it? When it comes to the structure of space and time, could light be the key to unlocking the final secrets of the universe? Answers may lie in the journey of two photons across seven billion light years of space, recorded by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. And these two tiny particles have just opened up a whole new chapter in our understanding of light, gravity, and the universe around us. Julie McEnery: "We’re really excited because we've captured rare experimental evidence probing the fundamental structure of space and time." Meet NASA's gamma-ray detectives. Led by project scientist Julie McEnery, they're searching for clues about the high-energy mysteries of our universe. But, they'll need more than a magnifying glass this. The team's one of kind tool? The Fermi satellite. Fermi looks at gamma-rays, the highest-energy form of light and it just surprised everyone with a discovery about the fabric of space and time. Julie McEnery: "So you might be thinking, two tiny particles of light, why is that important? Well you have to look at the very large and the very small together to understand the universe as a whole. So far, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which describes space and time as a smooth fabric that's distorted, or bent by massive objects, has been a spectacularly sucessful explaination of gravity and the large scale b...

Channel: LiveLeak Video Length: 0s Date Found: Wed, Jul 28 2010 12:50 AM Category: Educational Date Produced: Sat, Feb 06 2010 12:00 AM View Count: 0