
Violent Universe
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched into low Earth orbit and known before launch as GLAST, spends its first five years scanning the sky for the most violent events in the universe, and this NASA Scientific Visualization Studio production catalogs what it found. The film uses Fermi's own data visualizations to show what its two instruments actually catch: the Large Area Telescope mapping high-energy sources across the entire sky, and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor tracking sudden flashes from gamma-ray bursts as they happen. Active galactic nuclei, pulsars, and other extreme objects appear as the visualized data behind their gamma-ray signatures, rendered from real telescope readings rather than illustration. The film also touches on how this survey work feeds the hunt for dark matter, since some of the same high-energy signals are candidates for its signature. Rather than narrating a single event, it works through the telescope's five-year catalog to make the case that explosive activity, from nearby stellar remnants to distant galaxy cores, is constant across the cosmos.