Our Milky Way galaxy has a lot to offer us all. Exploring it all will probably be possible one day, albeit technology nowadays is still pretty undeveloped for that. There are between 100 billion and 200 billion stars in our galaxy, which means that the chances for the existence of alien life in our own cosmic vicinity are sky rocking.
According to NASA’s official website, the space agency has selected a telescope for which it has a very special mission. The gear will have to analyze a lot of crucial aspects of our galaxy, including its history, the formation of certain chemical elements, as well as the deaths of some of its stars.
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) will launch in 2025
The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is the advanced gear in question, and we’re also talking about a gamma-ray telescope. Unfortunately or not, we’ll still have a lot to wait for the deployment of the telescope: four years.
Thomas Zurbuchen, who is an associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, declared as quoted on the space agency’s website (nasa.gov):
For more than 60 years, NASA has provided opportunities for inventive, smaller-scale missions to fill knowledge gaps where we still seek answers,
COSI will answer questions about the origin of the chemical elements in our own Milky Way galaxy, the very ingredients critical to the formation of Earth itself.
Understanding where exactly certain chemical elements form in the Milky Way is crucial, and the telescope will tackle this aspect as well.
According to old measurements, the distance that separates our galaxy from Andromeda is somewhere at 2.5 million light-years. Such a distance is way too large for the current technology. Therefore, going anywhere in the Andromeda galaxy to study space objects there is practically impossible, but the good news is that there is still a lot to discover in our own Milky Way galaxy.
