Daily Image
20-02-2024
Goodbye AGILE!
| Submitter: | Benito Marcote |
| Description: | On 14 February 2024, the AGILE satellite gracefully re-entered Earth's atmosphere, concluding a remarkable journey that spanned over a decade. AGILE, an acronym for Astrorivelatore Gamma a Immagini LEggero, was a joint mission between the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), with contributions from NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). AGILE's mission was to study the high-energy gamma-ray sky in the energy range of 0.25-100 MeV, with a very large field of view and a resolution of 0.1-0.2 degrees. AGILE provided groundbreaking insights into the most energetic phenomena in the universe, such as pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, and active galactic nuclei. Launched on 23 April 2007, AGILE's primary mission was initially planned for three years, but its exceptional performance and scientific output led to its extension until the end of its operational life. AGILE made numerous groundbreaking discoveries, and the new re-analyses that are being conducted with new techniques will still show several discoveries from its data in the coming years. Personally, AGILE had a very successful record on the high-energy binary systems' field, after discovering the gamma-ray emission of eta Carinae, the gamma-ray flaring activity in Cygnus X-3, Cygnus X-1, or a gamma-ray flaring source, later revealed as the first binary system with a black hole and a Be spectral type star, which allowed us to confirm that the accretion/ejection coupling in stellar-mass black holes is independent of the donor star's nature. |
| Copyright: | Benito & AGILE Team |
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