BurstCube, a small science satellite of NASA, was launched into space from Cape Canaveral Launch Center in Florida, USA, on SpaceX’s 30th mission. It is designed to search for and locate gamma-ray bursts, which are short bursts of extremely high-energy energy, according to the official. Web site NASA.
BurstCube is a shoebox-sized device. It is equipped with a sensor that can detect gamma rays with an energy of 50 thousand to 1 million electron volts. By comparison, visible light has a power of only 2-3 electron volts.
Gamma-ray bursts typically occur after collisions of neutron stars (the extremely dense remnants of massive stars that explode as supernovae). Neutron stars can also emit gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space-time when two such objects come close to each other.
When gamma rays hit one of the BurstCube’s four detectors, they hit a layer of cesium iodide called the scintillator, which converts them into visible light. The light then hits another layer, an array of 116 silicon photomultiplier tubes, which converts it into a pulse of electrons; That’s what BurstCube measures.
“BurstCube detectors are angled, allowing us to detect and localize events over a wide area of the sky. Current gamma-ray missions can only see 70% of the sky at any given time because Earth blocks their view. Increasing our coverage with satellites like BurstCube will allow us to detect and localize events over a wide area of the sky. It increases our chances of catching more explosions,” BurstCube team member Israel Martinez explained.
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Source: Gazeta
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