Telescope to heaven to find out

A giant balloon flies into the sky from the southernmost tip of the world on December 26, carrying an extremely sensitive telescope to study the "spawning" of stars in the Milky Way.

The crane brought the BLAST telescope to the research station
McMurdo before it flies to the sky with a balloon. (Photo: NASA)

The US Aerospace Agency (NASA) carried out the launch on December 26 from the McMurdo research station in Antarctica. The airship flew 36km to allow telescopes to receive light with wavelengths less than 1mm, Livescience reported.

The mission of BLAST, the telescope "riding" the balloon, is to understand the reason why the number of stars in the Milky Way is much smaller than its "star birth ability" .

This is not the first flight of BLAST. Before that it flew to the sky 4 times. Thanks to the third flight of BLAST, also originating from Antarctica, NASA scientists discovered that stars were born at very fast speeds in distant galaxies. According to them, more than half of the stars in the universe were born about 5 billion years after the explosion of the cosmic birth.

Based on the data collected by BLAST, astronomers believe that every year Ngan Ha will "lay " a few dozen more stars.

"But in fact, only about four stars form in the Milky Way every year," said Barth Netterfield, a scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada.

Therefore, scientists hope data from BLAST's latest flight will help them explain why the Milky Way produced stars at a lower rate than its true capacity.