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Happy
Birthday Fermi
Posted on Jun 11, 2012 10:26:12 PM | Julie McEnery
The cake features a (hand drawn) Fermi gamma-ray skymap, showing the bright band produced by diffuse emission
from the disk of our Galaxy, the Fermi bubbles (in black) - huge lobes of gamma-rays extending above and below the
Galactic disk, and many point sources of gamma-rays (active galaxies, pulsars and much more).
The Fermi
observatory, sculpted here from fondant, shows the Large Area Telescope (grey box) and a 3-d representation of the
NaI (black/yellow) and BGO (orange) detectors of the gamma-ray burst monitor. Combined these instruments provide
observations over an extraordinarily large swath of the electromagnetic spectrum (from 8keV to over 300 GeV).
A pen is included to show the scale - this was a monstrous cake! The 70 or so of us at the launch anniversary
celebration only got through half the cake, despite being a delicious combination of chocolate and vanilla. This
is fortunate for our waistlines given the following ingredient list:
7 lbs flour
9 lbs sugar
30 eggs
6
lbs butter
3 lbs marshmallow
1 lb corn starch
8 cups of buttermilk
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