Scientists want to unveil the secrets of the universe and to achieve it The NASA has announced that for its next astrophysical mission it will develop a gamma ray telescope, which will be so powerful that it will serve to study the evolution of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
The telescope will be called ‘Compton Spectrometer and Imager’ (COSI) and they plan to finish it in 2025; It will mainly study the recent history of star birth and death, as well as the formation of chemical elements in the Milky Way, which could also shed light on the beginning of the universe.
“COSI will answer questions about the origin of the chemical elements in our galaxy, the same ones that are crucial for the formation of the Earth,” said the associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen.
It will be an expensive mission
This telescope will analyze the gamma rays of the radioactive atoms produced during the explosion of massive stars, with which a kind of map could be made to know where the chemical elements are formed; will also inquire into the origin mysterious of positrons (‘antielectrons’), subatomic particles that have the same amount of mass as an electron, but with a positive charge.
However, all this will not be cheap, as this astrophysical mission is estimated to cost close to $ 145 million, only in the development and the launch costs must be added to it.
Signals are coming from the center of our galaxy
Recently a team of experts detected unusual radio waves coming from the center of the Milky Way; the captured sounds belong to a cosmic object never seen before. According to astronomers, the light emitted by the object moves and projects in a way that is atypical to that of any celestial body known to humans. The brightness of the object varies dramatically and the signal turns on and off seemingly randomly.
Ziteng Wang, lead author of the new study on which these discoveries are based and a doctoral student at the University of Sydney School of Physics, explained that “the strangest property of this new signal is that it has a very high polarization, that oscillates in only one direction, but that direction turns over time“, said.
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