Highlights from the Fermi Large Area Telescope after 5 years of operations

Abstract

The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has been exploring the high-energy γ-ray sky since its launch on June 11, 2008. After 5 years of essentially flawless operations, the LAT collected more than 800 million γ rays from 20MeV to more than 300GeV. With its uniform coverage of the sky, the LAT allowed the first high statistics observations of γ-ray sources of known classes as well as the discovery of new emitters. The LAT also allowed a detailed study of the diffuse γ-ray emission, which constitutes roughly 90% of the LAT photons, and constrains cosmic-ray production and propagation in our own Galaxy. In this talk I will review the status and the performance of the LAT and describe some of the most important scientific results.