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Europe’s Gaia Probe Discovers Its First Supernova
Gaia, the orbital observatory launched last year by the European Space Agency with a mission to map the Milky Way, has discovered its first supernova, the ESA said Friday.
“While scanning the sky to measure the positions and movements of stars in our galaxy, Gaia has discovered its first stellar explosion in another galaxy far, far away,” the ESA said in a statement.
Scientists estimate that the supernova explosion, christened Gaia14aaa, took place in a galaxy at a distance of some 500 million light-years from Earth.
This is a Type 1a supernova, which signifies the explosion of a white dwarf locked in a binary system with a companion star.
To confirm Gaia’s discovery and establish the distance at which the phenomenon was produced, astronomers complemented the Gaia data with telescopes at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on Spain’s Canary Islands.
Gaia, which began its scientific work on July 25, repeatedly scans the entire sky, in such a way that each of the 1 billion stars in the final reckoning will be examined on an average of 70 times over the next five years.
Supernovas are rare phenomena: such explosions occur only a couple of times every century in each galaxy. But they are not so unusual in the sky as a whole, taking into account the hundreds of billions of galaxies to be found in the universe, ESA said.
Published in Latino Daily News
Source: http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/latino-daily-news/details/europes-gaia-probe-discovers-its-first-supernova/31127#When:12:09:15Z
