Explanation:
Forget X-ray vision—imagine what you could see with gamma-ray vision! The sky map pictured shows what the universe looks like to NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi sees light at energies about a billion times those the human eye can see, and the map combines 12 years of Fermi observations. The colors represent the brightness of gamma-ray sources, with brighter sources appearing brighter. The prominent stripe in the middle is the central plane of our Milky Way. Most of the red and yellow dots scattered above and below the plane of the Milky Way are very distant galaxies, while most of the galaxies within the plane are nearby pulsars. The blue background that fills the image is the diffuse glow of gamma rays from distant sources that are too faint to be detected individually. Some gamma-ray sources are still unidentified and are the subject of research—no one currently knows what they are.