A collaborative French-Chinese satellite was launched on Saturday

 A collaborative French-Chinese satellite was launched on Saturday, marking a significant instance of cooperation between a Western nation and China. The mission aims to investigate the universe's most powerful explosions. The Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM), engineered by teams from both countries, is designed to detect gamma-ray bursts. These bursts are ancient light signals that have traversed billions of light years to reach Earth.

 

The satellite, weighing 930 kilograms and equipped with four instruments—two French and two Chinese—was launched at approximately 3 PM from the Xichang space base in Sichuan province, aboard a Chinese Long March 2-C rocket. This event was observed by journalists present at the site.

 

Gamma-ray bursts are typically triggered by the cataclysmic explosion of massive stars, those exceeding 20 times the mass of the sun, or by the merging of compact stars. These bursts emit extraordinarily bright cosmic beams, releasing energy on a scale that surpasses the combined output of a billion billion suns. Observing these bursts allows scientists to "look back in time," according to Ore Gottlieb, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Astrophysics in New York, because the light from these events takes a considerable amount of time to reach us.

 

The gamma rays, as they travel through space, carry with them clues about the gas clouds and galaxies they encounter, providing valuable data that can enhance our understanding of the universe's history and evolution. Gottlieb emphasized that SVOM has the potential to solve many enigmas related to gamma-ray bursts, including detecting the most distant bursts in the universe, which correspond to the earliest ones. The most remote gamma-ray bursts detected so far occurred just 630 million years after the Big Bang, a period when the universe was still very young.

 

Frederic Daigne, an astrophysicist at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, highlighted the intrinsic interest in gamma-ray bursts due to their nature as extreme cosmic explosions. These events offer critical insights into the processes involved in the death of certain stars, thereby deepening our comprehension of stellar life cycles.