I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again — the greatest thing about space-borne observatories is they have 24-hour darkness to enjoy. This makes it easier to catch fleeting cosmic events, even explosions.
Like that moment last month when NASA’s Swift telescope saw its 500th gamma-ray burst. Given that these powerful fireworks disappear within a few hours of appearing, the telescope is a great tool for astronomers to have since it’s sole mission is to check out where they came from and what they mean.
It’s so quick that it can detect the burst and swing around to see it in only 90 seconds. That’s right, less time than it takes to brew a coffee.
Gamma-ray bursts are explosions of intense energy from almost cataclysmic events in the universe — things like the creation of black holes or the beginning of a supernova. And in 2008, Swift was lucky enough to be the very first thing to watch the very moment when a star exploded.
It was peering at one supernova in the galaxy NGC 2770 when another supernova happened right in the same field of view. Thanks to this incredible coincidence, SWIFT was able to watch the early stages of the explosion and a bunch of other telescopes swung their mighty eyes in the same direction.
“For years we have dreamed of seeing a star just as it was exploding, but actually finding one is a once in a lifetime event,” team leader Alicia Soderberg told astronomy.com at the time. “This newly born supernova is going to be the Rosetta stone of supernova studies for years to come.”
SWIFT catches 100 explosions a year on average, and in between it’s been able to check out comets and other astronomical phenomena. The sheer number of supernovae it watches allows us to create a catalogue of sorts, putting the explosions into different categories and trying to draw generalizations about how these star deaths occur.
It will be interesting to see what it comes up with next.
