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R.W. Romani (Stanford U.)
EGRET gave us a first look at the Gamma-ray sky, but starting in 2007 we expect that this window on the non-thermal universe will be thrown wide open with GLAST. One key lesson from EGRET is that will we need coordinated multi-wavelength efforts from the wider astrophysics community to make sense of the GLAST observations. As the first sky survey data come in, we will want to identify many more sources from the known blazar and pulsar classes and to start to constrain novel types of objects. I describe here some of the preparatory work that is being done to get ready for this phase. Much of the work starts from radio surveys, helping us zero in on non-thermal phenomena. By identifying candidate gamma-ray blazars and radio pulsars we hope to be ready to interpret much of the GLAST sky. Of course understanding of the source physics requires focused campaigns on bright sources and I note a few non-thermal radio/X-ray studies that can advance this work. I conclude by discussing briefly the sorts of supporting data that will let us chase down the GLAST survey sources that won't yield to easy identification, and should lead to the pay-off of new and exotic object classes.
This work was supported in part by NASA grant NAGS-13344.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 #3
© 2004. The American Astronomical Soceity.