The team of scientists noted that the telescopes recorded oxygen

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that they have captured a series of images of a colossal detonation in the Pinwheel galaxy, 21 million light years away. The team of astronomers said the image was taken within hours of the burst of light from the explosion reaching Earth, the soonest an image has been snapped after the cosmic explosion. The images are thought moncler jackets to the be the first such images captured by the space agency, and astronomers say they represent a “supernova of a generation.” “We caught the supernova just 11 hours after it exploded, so soon that we were later able to calculate the actual moment of the explosion to within 20 minutes,” said Peter Nugent at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab in California. Mr. Nugent, who led the study, said the space agency employed the use of three powerful Earth-based telescopes and the American space agency NASA’s Swift orbital observatory. Scientists say the results produced a wealth of data, including showing in unprecedented detail how heavier elements, such as oxygen and iron, emerged from the supernova explosion. The study examined the light of the explosion, which reached the brightness of 2.5 billion suns, then slowly faded. The group of scientists then worked backward to determine exactly when the supernova occurred. NASA officials noted that the supernova is the closest one to our planet in 25 years. The team of scientists noted that the telescopes recorded oxygen, magnesium, silicon, calcium and iron, which extended at the rate of 16,000 kilometres a second, around 5 percent of the speed of light. NASA officials say the discovery will allow astronomers to better understand how elements ejected by supernovas mixed into the universe. “Understanding how these giant explosions create and mix materials is important because supernovae are where we get most of the elements that make up the Earth and even our own bodies moncler – for instance, these supernovae are a major source of iron in the universe,” said Mark Sullivan of Oxford. “So we are all made of bits of exploding stars.” In the Nugent paper, published on Thursday, the speed of the discovery is widely considered the single more important factor in the study. The team discovered the supernova only 11 hours after it exploded, allowing for the first estimate of the size of the star when it blew up. “Not only is this the closest Type Ia supernova in the last 25 years, it is the youngest and brightest ever discovered in the digital age,” said Mr. Nugent. “Observations with ground- and space-based telescopes from the radio through X-ray wavelengths have provided unprecedented constraints on how the supernova exploded.” The scientists noted that these rapid observations were not due to luck; they were possible because the Palomar 48-inch telescope, which was used to discover the supernova, is effectively a robot. The telescope observes all night long without a human driving it, allowing scientists to examine data that otherwise might be lost.moncler jackets for women. The data are then automatically processed by computers, and new potential supernovae are presented to the discovery team when they wake up. “This event might have been missed or not detected right away–maybe even a week later, if we only relied on human eyes to do the search,” said Nugent. “No one has done this type of search on this scale before, and as new astronomical surveys come online in the next few years, this framework for extracting novel science from large amounts of data will become increasingly important.”