Gamma-ray astronomy at the highest energies

One of the major astronomical discoveries of the past decade has been the detection of gamma rays of energy in excess of 0.1 TeV from a variety of galactic sources. These detections were made with ground-based telescopes using the earth's atmosphere as the detecting medium. The sources detected include the Crab Nebula (a 940 year old supernova remnant), some millisecond radio pulsars (rotating neutron stars), and binary X-ray sources (close-binaries systems containing accreting neutron stars). (orig.)