Science with Integral five years on

Integral's gamma-ray mission was originally to last just two years. Given its achievements so far, it is not a surprise that the mission has been extended to 2010. Looking beyond our galaxy, science teams have located more than a hundred super-massive black holes, a million times the mass of the Sun, and which are now believed to be present in space on a much wider scale. Another recently identified source, a quasar, is the farthest object detected by Integral so far, a gamma-ray lighthouse shining from the very edge of the universe. In our galaxy, Integral has also detected, by chance, a rare kind of transient gamma-ray source and discovered a new class of celestial objects emitting X-rays, unidentified in previous observations, called 'superfast X-ray transients' which are probably widespread throughout the Galaxy. Also, in the galactic centre, Integral has made a key discovery that shows that a lot of particles of matter are getting annihilated by coming into contact with their antimatter counterparts.ESApod video programme