Tracing the History of Starlight with NASA’s Fermi Mission

Scientists using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have measured all the starlight produced over 90 percent of the universe’s history. The analysis, which examines the gamma-ray output of distant galaxies, estimates the formation rate of stars and provides a reference for future missions that will explore the still-murky early days of stellar evolution. One of the main goals of the Fermi mission is to assess the extragalactic background light (EBL), a cosmic fog composed of all the ultraviol