The Gaia space probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) has discovered, on its journey through the sky, its first stellar explosion in another galaxy. The event has been dubbed “Gaia14aaa” and it occurred in a distant galaxy some 500 million light years away .
The stellar explosion has been found thanks to a sudden increase in the brightness of the galaxy between two observations of the satellite made from one month to another. “ This type of repeated tracking is very useful for studying the changing nature of the sky . As Gaia fixes on a patch of the sky again and again, we have the opportunity to see thousands of guest stars in the celestial tapestry, ”says Simon Hodgkin, a member of the research team.
Gaia, whose function Gaia is to survey the one billion stars in the Milky Way, measuring their positions and movements, began its scientific work on July 25 (it scans the sky every 6 hours) and, according to astronomers, it will be able to reveal us in the future other phenomena of the universe equal or more powerful than this supernova .
Thanks to the prisms of this space probe that span regions of red and blue wavelength to produce a low resolution spectrum, it is possible for astronomers to locate information about the signatures of the many chemical elements present in the light source that it has allowed. the identification of this supernova.
To confirm the nature of this stellar explosion , the astronomers compared the Gaia data with more observations from Earth, using the Isaac Newton (INT) telescope and the Liverpool robotic telescope on La Palma (Canary Islands).
