Dr. Rene Ong

Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

Viewing the Universe in Gamma-Rays

The Universe is filled with invisible radiation that cannot be seen by human eyes. At the highest energies and the shortest wavelengths, gamma rays are produced in extreme environments near powerful cosmic accelerators such as supermassive black holes, neutron stars, and even the center of our Galaxy. These gamma rays, having energies more than a billion times that of visible light, can be detected at Earth by novel instruments that look more like particle physics experiments than conventional telescopes. This talk will discuss the basic techniques of gamma-ray astronomy and will review some of the recent exciting results from the latest generation of instruments, focusing on the ground-based telescope VERITAS in Arizona and the Fermi telescope in space.