A French-Chinese satellite yesterday blasted off on a hunt for the mightiest explosions in the universe, in a notable example of cooperation between a Western power and the Asian giant.
Developed by engineers from both countries, the Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) would seek out gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), the light from which has traveled billions of light years to reach Earth.
The 930kg satellite carrying four instruments — two French, two Chinese — took off at about 3pm aboard a Chinese Long March 2-C rocket from a space base in Xichang, China, Agence France-Presse journalists witnessed.
Photo: AFP
Gamma-ray bursts generally occur after the explosion of huge stars — those more than 20 times as big as the sun — or the fusion of compact stars. The extremely bright cosmic beams can give off a blast of energy equivalent to more than a a quintillion suns.
Observing them is like “looking back in time, as the light from these objects takes a long time to reach us,” said Ore Gottlieb, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Astrophysics in New York.
The rays carry traces of the gas clouds and galaxies they pass through on their journey through space — valuable data for better understanding the history and evolution of the universe.
“SVOM has the potential to unravel several mysteries in the field of [gamma-ray bursts], including detecting the most distant GRBs in the universe, which correspond to the earliest GRBs,” Gottlieb said.
The most distant bursts identified to date were produced just 630 million years after the Big Bang — when the universe was in its infancy.
“We are ... interested in gamma-ray bursts for their own sake, because they are very extreme cosmic explosions which allow us to better understand the death of certain stars,” said Frederic Daigne, an astrophysicist at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris.
“All of this data makes it possible to test the laws of physics with phenomena that are impossible to reproduce in the laboratory on Earth,” Daigne said.
Once analyzed, the data could help us to better understand the composition of space, the dynamics of gas clouds or other galaxies.
The project stems from a partnership between the French and Chinese space agencies, as well as other scientific and technical groups from both nations.
Space cooperation at this level between the West and China is fairly uncommon, especially since the US banned all collaboration between NASA and Beijing in 2011.
Once in orbit 625km above the Earth, the satellite would send its data back to observatories. The main challenge is that gamma-ray bursts are extremely brief, leaving scientists in a race against time to gather information.
Once a burst is detected, SVOM would send an alert to a team on duty around the clock. Within five minutes, they would have to rev up a network of telescopes on the ground that would align precisely with the axis of the burst’s source to make more detailed observations.
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