Friday, September 12, 2014

Gaia spots a supernova

Gaia discovered a supernova! SN Gaia14aaa occurred in a galaxy 500 million ly away. Of course the primary mission of the European Space Agency probe is to measure one billion stars in our galaxy but researchers stumbled across an "anomaly" to later learn it was not a fault. After analysing the spectra, they thought it a Type Ia, offset slightly from the centre of the galaxy. From an article at the ESA site.

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