Constellation Orion, visible light to gamma rays - with lines

Credit: Axel Mellinger (Central Michigan University) and NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration The blazar TXS 0506+056 lies among the familiar stars of the constellation Orion but is located well beyond our Milky Way galaxy, about 4 billion light-years from Earth. The view transitions to the gamma-ray sky as seen by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, revealing the blazar as Fermi has seen it for most of the past decade. Brighter colors indicate greater numbers of gamma rays. The last image shows the blazar during an 8-month-long flaring episode that began in April 2017. During this period, the blazar produced more gamma rays in a given time period than Fermi had seen over the previous 10 years.