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UWA and France on hunt for exploding stars
The University of Western Australia and the French Government are working together with industry and researchers to improve monitoring of space for exploding stars billions of light years away.
UWA is working with the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, the French Government’s space agency, to install a network of receiver stations across northern Australia. The stations will receive alerts from the Space Variable Objects Monitor satellite in high orbit above Earth. The satellite is sensitive to gamma ray bursts which signal massive stars exploding.
Within seconds an alert will be sent to telescopes, including the UWA Zadko Telescope, which will capture the rare events in the sky above northern Australia. The satellite stations across Australia fill a global blind spot, allowing scientists to access a unique part of the sky.