New NASA telescope will observe star birth and death in the Milky Way’s evolution

Learning about the galaxy’s past is intrinsically linked to understanding more about our cosmic home. Our solar system lies within only one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

Called the Compton Spectrometer and Imager, or COSI, the Gamma-ray Telescope will observe the formation of chemical elements in the Milky Way and study the birth and death of stars. To find these chemical elements, COSI will look at gamma rays that were produced by the explosions of massive stars in our galaxy. This will help map the chemical elements released by the explosions and where they formed in the Milky Way.

“For more than 60 years, NASA has provided opportunities for inventive, small-scale missions to fill knowledge gaps where we still seek answers,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. Huh.” “COSI will answer questions about the origin of chemical elements in our own Milky Way galaxy, which are key elements for Earth’s formation.”

The telescope will also detect the faint origin of our galaxy’s positrons, subatomic particles that have a positive charge and a mass equal to that of an electron, which has a negative charge. The positrons found in space on a large scale are also known as antielectrons.

The technology behind this telescope has been in development for decades and only recently took off NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon in 2016. The COSI initiative originated in 2019 as one of 18 proposals submitted to NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program. Now, the telescope has been selected for further development. The mission is expected to cost $145 million, not including launch.

John Tomasik will be the mission’s principal investigator at the University of California, Berkeley.

– Advertisement –

new wave of space exploration

It will not be the first NASA project to bear the “Compton” name. NS Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched in 1991, was one of the agency’s four great observatories designed to explore our sky through different wavelengths of light.

Other great observatories that are still operating include the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Compton was decommissioned in 2000 when one of its gyroscopes failed. The Spitzer Space Telescope is retired in 2020.

But new telescopes are preparing to launch and explore the universe in new ways.

It’s going to be a busy decade, with the James Webb Space Telescope set to launch in December, followed by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope in mid-2020, and now Compton in 2025.