Posted on Jun 11, 2012 10:26:12 PM | Julie McEnery | 1 Comments
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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
Fermilicious!