Fermi's 12-year All-Sky Gamma-ray Map

Explanation: Forget X-ray vision — imagine what you could see with gamma-ray vision! The featured all-sky map shows what the universe looks like to NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope . Fermi sees light with energies about a billion times what the human eye can see, and the map combines 12 years of Fermi observations. The colors represent the brightness of the gamma-ray sources , with brighter sources appearing lighter in color. The prominent stripe across the middle is the central plane of our Milky Way galaxy . Most of the red and yellow dots scattered above and below the Milky Way's plane are very distant galaxies , while most of those 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 dim to be detected individually. Some gamma-ray sources remain unidentified and topics of research — currently no one knows what they are.