SUMMARY: The ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has resolved the diffuse glow from the heart of the Milky Way into hundreds of individual sources, solving a mystery that has stumped astronomers for more than 30 years. Astronomers believed that the gamma ray glow came from the interactions of atoms, but this couldn't explain why the glow was so strong. Integral was able to see the individual celestial objects, and the data suggests that they might be binary systems, where a black hole or neutron star is orbiting another star.

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That's great, I'm glad they could solve this mystery, we are learning more about the universe each day

It's exciting that half the objects discovered do not seem to fit any previous model of Gamma-source. I'll have to look for the paper in Nature to see if they say some concrete things about energy and flux. Until we see that, it's kind of pointless to speculate about the nature of these things.

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Forming opinions as we speak

Does this also mean that there are more of these objects (binaries) in the centre of our galaxy? If so is this because there are simply more objects there, or is there a different population of these object compared to the rest of the galaxy?

Cheers

http://www.esa.int/export/images/INTEGRA1_M.jpg

We don't know if they will find any more binary sources of of gamma rays. People were often wondering why there is a massive glow of gamma rays in the centre of our Galaxy, and the workers in Europe have tried to find what all this gamma source came from, what it was. No person knew what was causing this glow, but it now seems to be coming from a number of massive neutron stars and giant balck holes. NASA were looking into this mystery and also others from Russia and Europe. The integral project was started by ESA and has now shown that most of it is produced by nearly hundred individual sources.The big gamma-ray telescope IBIS has now got to look inside the middle of our Galaxy. Integral has looked deep into our galaxy, a place where no person could see before, there was too much blocking our Galaxy's centre and we could not detect what was inside. There has now been the discovery of 91 gamma-ray sources inside our Galactic core. To think there might be super massive blackholes and super giant neutron stars inside the mid point of our Galatic center. They have found more than 90% of the energy from the Gamma core of our galaxy, energy output from these new objects accounts for almost ninety per cent of the gamma-ray from the center of the milky way. This is now helping us have a better understanding of the workings of the universe.

http://www.esa.int/export/images/Integral_..._terrebleue.jpg

Yes, we are lerning so much about our univers.