XICHANG: A French-Chinese satellite blasted off Saturday 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) is carrying four instruments -- two French, two Chinese -- that will seek out gamma-ray bursts, the light from which has travelled billions of light years to reach Earth.
The 930-kilogram satellite "successfully" took off around 3:00 pm aboard a Chinese Long March 2-C rocket from a space base in Xichang, in southwestern Sichuan province, China's National Space Administration said.
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 billion billion suns.
Observing them is like "looking back in time, as the light from these objects takes a long time to reach us", Ore Gottlieb said, 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.
Once analysed, the data could help to improve understanding of the composition of space, and 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.
Once in orbit 625 kilometres above the Earth, the satellite will 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. — AFP
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