After the first ten years of Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission, both the Large Area Telescope (LAT) and the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) instruments have better performance than ever, with enhancements to pipeline processing and analysis software. This is promising for new and relevant science and discoveries to be accomplished with the Fermi mission, in particular for high-energy and multi-frequency astrophysics, and for astro-particle multi-messenger physics. This in view of synergetic observations in parallel to the new and incoming observatories and experiments for cosmic photons, gravitational waves, neutrinos and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
The Fermi LAT collaboration has released, at the end of February 2019, an early version of the fourth Fermi Gamma-ray LAT (4FGL) source catalog, based on the first eight years of LAT science data collection. The 4FGL catalog is the largest and deepest ever in gamma-ray photon energy range (from 50 MeV to 1 TeV) and represents one of the main LAT goals after the first 10 years of Fermi operations. The 4FGL catalog includes 5098 gamma-ray sources detected above 4 sigma significance, for which localization and spectral properties are provided. Additional information and products will be added in subsequent updates, including light curves, analysis flags, more or revised information about multi-wavelength associations of some sources.
The companion fourth Fermi LAT AGN catalog (4LAC), composed of more than 3100 sources, is focussed on blazars and other AGN, objects representing more than 70% of all the high-Galactic-latitude gamma-ray sources detected in the 4FGL catalog. The 4LAC catalog includes information on AGN source or candidate associations, basic multi-frequency properties, source class, synchrotron peak, redshifts, gamma-ray spectral and variability properties, and characterization of the whole gamma-ray AGN population.