Highligths from the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Abstract

The Fermi mission is operating in low Earth orbit since June 2008. Thanks to its large acceptance, the Large Area Telescope (LAT), the on-board pair-conversion telescope for high-energy electromagnetic radiation, has collected more than one billion photons from the whole sky above 20 MeV. The LAT also provided the largest high-energy cosmic-ray electron sample to date, with about 10k events above 1 TeV.This unique database allows the study of thousands of gamma-ray sources of very different nature, from our own Galaxy to distant and active galactic nuclei, as well as addressing fundamental questions of particle astrophysics like the nature of dark matter and the origin of energetic gamma-ray bursts. In addition, cosmic-ray electrons provide a unique probe of the origin and propagation mechanisms of cosmic rays in local galactic environment.