Nuclear explosion in the Milky Way: discovery thanks to Italian telescopes

An amazing nuclear explosion occurred in the Milky Way, and the Italians were the first to discover it. As Il Messaggero Veneto wrote through his website, a nuclear explosion occurred in detail from a galactic source 8000 light years away from our planet, with an emission associated with high-energy gamma rays that had not been recorded before until now.

To highlight this story was Magical telescopes in the Canary Islands, Projects you are also involved in, with an essential role Udine University. There was a “burst” RS Ophiuchi Of the constellation Ofiuco, in the Milky Way, “is a recurring nova – explains the Venice Daily – a star that causes periodic gamma-ray emissions.”

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Thanks to this discovery, it was possible to define nova as “a new class of galactic sources of extremely high-energy gamma rays arising from the acceleration of protons, which opens a new window into the knowledge of cosmic rays”. The results of this extraordinary discovery were subsequently published in the prestigious international scientific journal Nature Astronomy, and in doing so, they were published all over the world.

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The University of Udine is participating in Project Magic with the Astroparticle Physics group, coordinated by Barbara De Lotto, of the Department of Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics (Dmif), and the event in question arose on August 8 last year, when the explosion was detected by the Fermi Observatory’s Large Area Telescope detector. NASA spacecraft with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (Hess) telescopes in Namibia. Once the “alarm” is raisedthe two magical telescopes of the Canary Islands were better oriented toward the direction of the gamma-ray flux by RS Ophiuchi, which re-erupted after activity recorded in 2006.

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« Result – explains de Lotto From the University of Friulian – obtained thanks to the discoveries made by the Cherenkov atmospheric telescopes, of which Magic is made, on the Spanish island of La Palma, in the Canary Islands. Magic and CTA – he adds – are two massive training environments for doctoral students, including, currently, Irene Borelli and Alessandro Vigliano.” Currently, University of Udine researchers, Michele Palatello and Diego Cuz, along with Scientific Director Barbara Di Lotto, are involved in the Magic Project, working specifically on the construction and testing of the four future Calibox chambers. Italy plays a leading role in this partnership of an international character thanks to the contributions made to it by Infn, the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, and the National Institute of Astrophysics INAF.