NASA’s Fermi to Reveal New Findings About Pulsars

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