The Gaia satellite’graba’ the death of a supernova about 500 … – Faro de Vigo

The death of a supernova is something unusual: a brilliant light is your particular farewell. When a star that weighs at least 40 times more than the sun explodes in his last gasp, her days are numbered. Then has a brightness million times before, such as a galaxy, and may be observable up to a month. This phenomenon is what we live just recorded the satellite very powerful “Gaia”. Images overflowing witness a stellar force fenómemo occurred about 500 million years ago.

The Gaia satellite, successfully launched on December 19, 2013, the first supernova discovered from observations made on a celestial body that began on August 30. The spectrophotometric observations of the same satellite and monitoring has been done from ground-based observatories, including the Spanish Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, have confirmed that it is the explosion of a Type Ia supernova 500 million light years away , as they say in the institutions involved.

From the Galician team that is responsible for coding and classifying data of the mission, the Laboratory for Applications of Artificial Intelligence, University of A Coruña, and collaboration in astrophysics from the University of Vigo, Ana Ulla, explain how you usually act in such cases. “Observation of a sudden increase in the brightness of this celestial body (by a factor 6) activates the alert system”

The Observatory expert ? Astronomy at the University of Warsaw (Poland), ukasz Wyrzykowski, described it: “We thought it was a supernova but we needed to have more clues to confirm this finding.” So to confirm the nature of the supernova, astronomers complemented Gaia satellite data with other observations based on the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and “Liverpool” Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos “in La Palma, in the Islands Canaries. According Nadejda Blagorodnova the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, “in the spectrum of this source could identify the presence of iron and other elements found in supernovae.” “This is the first supernova of what we hope will be a series of major discoveries of Gaia mission “says Timo Prusti, investigator of this flagship project that has placed Europe at the forefront of research in astrometry.