NASA's Fermi to Reveal New Findings About Pulsars

Trent J. Perrotto
Headquarters, Washington                                        

WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Nov. 3, to discuss new discoveries about pulsars by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

A pulsar is the closest thing to a black hole astronomers can observe directly. Pulsars are capable of crushing half a million times more mass than Earth into a sphere no larger than a city. Some of these objects spin tens of thousands of revolutions per minute, faster than the blades of a kitchen blender.

Participants are:

- Paulo Freire, astrophysicist, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany

- Pablo Saz Parkinson, astrophysicist, University of California at Santa Cruz
- Bruce Allen, director, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany
- Victoria Kaspi, physics professor, McGill University in Montreal

For dial-in information, media representatives should e-mail their name, media affiliation and telephone number to Trent Perrotto at trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov.

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA's website at http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.

For more information about NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, visit http://www.nasa.gov/fermi.

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