14 DAY TRIAL // Brainiacs with the European Space Agency are happy to announce that, although being on the job for quite a short while (since this year's July 25, to be more precise), unmanned space observatory Gaia has already detected a massive cosmic kaboom.
The blast pinned down with the help of this astronomical observatory took place in a galaxy at a distance of several hundred light-years from our planet and boiled down to the explosion of a star. To scientists, such events are known as supernovas.
Gaia sees a massive stellar explosion
Astronomers with the European Space Agency explain that, for the time being, Gaia has just one but very important job to do. It a nutshell, it must continuously scan the sky and check up on stars to see what they might be up to.
It is expected that, over the course of the following 5 years, the space observatory will scan a whopping one billion stars an average of 70 times. As explained by specialist Simon Hodgkin, “This kind of repeated survey comes in handy for studying the changeable nature of the sky.”
While busy monitoring the sky, Gaia detected a sudden rise in the brightness of a galaxy estimated to sit about 500 million light-years from our planet. This rise in brightness, labeled an anomaly, was first documented on August 30, Phys Org informs.
It did not take astronomers long to figure out that this spike in brightness was the result of a supernova. However, they couldn't announce their find just yet. As astronomer Łukasz Wyrzykowski puts it, “We immediately thought it might be a supernova, but needed more clues to back up our claim.”
Confirming the massive cosmic explosion
Hoping to find evidence that the anomaly detected with Gaia's help was in fact a supernova, researchers with the European Space Agency had the astronomical observatory analyze the light originating from this cosmic event. The goal was to pin down the signatures of the chemical compounds present in the light source.
Sure enough, this analysis confirmed the astronomers’ suspicions that the cosmic event responsible for the spike in brightness documented on August 30 was a supernova. “In the spectrum of this source, we could already see the presence of iron and other elements that are known to be found in supernovas,” explains space enthusiast Nadejda Blagorodnova.
This stellar explosion identified with Gaia's help is now known to the scientific community as Gaia14aaa. Apparently, it is a Type Ia supernova, i.e. an explosion of a white dwarf that sat in a binary system together with another star. European Space Agency scientists expect that, in the years to come, the space observatory will make it possible for them to pin down many other such cosmic events.