The world’s most powerful gamma-ray telescope soared into space on Thursday on a mission to track down black holes, exploding stars and mysterious bursts of radiation emanating from the fringes of the Universe.
The 330-million-euro observatory, Integral, was placed flawlessly into orbit by a Russian Proton rocket, one of the workhorses of space, launched from the Baikonur space station in Kazakhstan, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.
The telescope, built by ESA with contributions from the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and the United States, is the most sensitive detector ever made of gamma-ray radiation.
This is high-intensity energy typically emitted by massive stars in their death throes, when they explode to become supernovae.
Their death eventually gives birth to life, helping to create other stars and planets many millions of years later.
”When they explode, these giant stars spew out a series of heavy elements which enrich the interstellar environment and become the stuff of which we are made,” Gilbert Vedrenne, a leading scientist at the Centre for Space Radiation Research (CESR) said.
”With Integral, we hope to gain a better understanding of how this stardust is ejected into the Universe.”
Supernovae can also collapse in upon themselves to create neutron stars — stars of incredibly dense, compacted matter, that can then develop into black holes.
These are the mightiest and most mysterious phenomena in the known cosmos, with the ability to suck in stars that venture too close to their gravitational maw.
”Only gamma rays enable us to sidle up and get a really close look at black holes,” said Jacques Paul of France’s Atomic Energy Commission.
”That way, we may be able to get a first-hand evidence
of a flaw in the laws of physics.”
Integral’s other task will be to scout for gamma bursts — unexplained explosions at the outer reaches of the detected Universe that were only spotted a few years ago.
Integral, weighing more than four tons and five metres long, stands for International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory.
The 92-minute flight ended with the separation of the payload from the rocket’s fourth stage and the telescope began a slow journey to take up its orbital position, mission officials said.
Integral will be deployed in an egg-shaped orbit, swinging between 90 000 and 153 000 kilometres above the Earth.
Its four instruments, which will also simultaneously monitor emissions in the X-ray and visible light sections of the energy spectrum, will undergo two months of testing before the start of the two-year mission, which could be extended for a further three years if ESA’s finances permit.
Integral joins three very powerful telescopes, Nasa’s Chandra and Hubble, and ESA’s XMM-Newton, in the new generation of orbiting observatories. – Sapa-AFP