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Hubble Snaps Pix Of Dying Supernova
The Hubble has taken some great pictures of a supernova according to CNN. You can get a more indepth article, and more pictures from Space.com story on the same subject. Purty explosions!
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I'm dissapointed by the size of the pictures in either story. Does anyone know where I might be able to find bigger pictures? (I need a new background. :))
The Hubble telescope does none of these things. Of course, neither does an electron microscope or a hammer--because they are merely tools. But when wielded by a trained, creative and insightful scientist they can help produce startling new theories that make our life better.
But the Hubble telescope isn't in the hands of trained, creative and insightful scientists. It is in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians who dole out a minute here and a minute there on whatever pet projects they happen to favor. When Scientist A creates a theory based on an observation made with Hubble, these chairwarmers refuse to let Scientist B use the 'scope to attempt demolish that theory for fear it will make Hubble look bad.
We obviously can't afford to make enough for everyone, so the only solution is to let no one have it. Decommission the Hubble
What the heck is a "dying supernova" supposed to be?
;)
If a supernova is the act of a star "dying" and throwing off it's outer layers, does that then mean that a supernova is the zombie of the star, and when the supernova died, some cosmic cleric cast turn undead on it?
Perhaps fading supernova remnant would have been a better choice.
A supernova (as in this instance) is a dying Star not a dying supernova. The supernova is actually quite young.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
That'll do. :D Thank you.
Ha, thats nothing special. Now if the hubble could take pictures of Jennifer Aniston topless without getting sued, then I'd be in awe.
To quote the CNN/Reuters article: Timed to precede the U.S. Independence Day holiday on Thursday, the newly released image was made in two exposures, one in January 2000, the other in January 2002.
And what will everybody remember? That nice supernova that was photographed by Hubble the Great just before July 4th.
Nice PR job, NASA. I appreciate it. Sincerely.
I used to go to slashdot to get information that wasn't available elsewhere; I don't if it's just because today is a slow tech news day or whatever, but posting stuff that's been on CNN or MSNBC's webpage for so long they no longer keep it on the front page doesn't make slashdot look very important. Why copy their stories? There's gotta be better content out there.
This isn't news!! I've seen pics of supernovas all the time! God! Doesn't anybody watch Star Trek??!?!?!
:)
Heh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What, are they using it to do traffic reports now?
That passing line in the space.com article about lack of symmetry connects to some interesting physics.
Scientists were embarrassed for a while by the fact that the most realistic computer models of supernovae would fizzle instead of exploding. A simulated shock wave would start from the core, but with the mass of a star falling in on it the shock wave always stalled.
Then they switched from 1-dimensional simulations to 2-dimensional simulations when they got hold of enough computer power. Turns out there's an overturn instability. The shock wave can't make it out *on average* but does locally. Some small fluctuation gets bigger as the shock wave pounds at it and that direction gets more of the action.
Which explained an old observation that a lot of supernova remnants were moving pretty fast. Among other things, the supernova is a rocket engine with peak power equal to the luminosity of a galaxy, and (forgive me) astronomical amounts of propellant.
That was a qualitative insight from a quantitative increase in computer power.
Screw bottlerockets, i want me one of them!
The Hubble helps the scientific process in all of the ways it should. These /.ers who think your post is informative are already desperate to believe that bureaucrats capriciously stifle science.
Dealing with limited resources is a fact of life. The Hubble project has done far more for real science than it has for the front pages of newspapers and the public's self-esteem for knowing their taxes pay for it all.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
As an astronomer who studies Cassiopeia A- I will admit that this picture doesn't really say alot to the public other than "Hey pretty picture" and it is NOT a dying star! The reason it is of interest is because the Chandra Space Telescope first saw evidence of a point source at Cas A's center indicating a remnant of the supernova explosion that hasn't been seen in any other wavelengths. Much as a few of us have tried we have not been able to find a source in optical or infrared for the x-ray point source indicating that the progenitor star that made the supernova may infact be a black hole rather than a neutron star which is what makes this object so interesting.
http://www.seds.org/~spider/spider/Vars/casA.html
... if they would have showed the actual center or origin point. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there not suppose to be a pulsar left over by the explosion?
Looking at the larger pictures, its difficult to tell where the pulsar is...
There isn't a lot of colour in the night sky even through a good telescope. I know this from theory and observation, but even so I goggle along with everyone else at the false colour, saturated colour images that they come out with.
Must be our monkey brains hardwired for picking out speckles of colour that mean ripe bananas in that tree over there!
Is the from the dept of ... a reference to the third Sten book, The Court of a Thousand Suns, by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole?
"Colors highlight parts of the debris where chemical elements are glowing. The dark blue fragments, for example, are richest in oxygen. The red material is rich in sulfur. Green areas were originally recorded as orange-red but recolored to visually separate them."
:-)
Anyway... anyone know where to get wallpaper sized hubble pics? That would look cool on my desktop
first oxymoronic post!
Hubble phots need to be easier to find and browse any current system i have looked at has been really disappointing. The photos can really be amazing but you either get tiny pictures or you can't find what you want.
Dan Mayer: my blog, essays, art, etc
I just can't believe it. First Princess Di and now the paparazzi are using Hubble to rob the dignity of a dying star.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
thx for letting me down easy !!
*cries*
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
uhm, let's see ... the article mentioned debris being flung at 75 billion meters per hour. That's 270 trillion meters per second, or 2.7e12 m/s. The speed of light is a bit less than 3e8 m/s ... isn't this incredible observation more exciting than an exploding star? :)
hrm. then again. maybe not.
Thanks man, it's appreciated. Too bad you got modded down as well. Cannae take a little constructive crticism, can they?
human will be able to create super novas and bomb them, it must be much more spectacular :)
I like how they slipped this little doozy in there:
Our own sun and planets are constructed from the debris of supernovae that exploded billions of years ago.
Uh, yeah. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.
Sometimes you just can't tell real science from wild conjecture.
No No! We radio-carbon-dated something and it was 4 billion years old! The lab next door came up with 3 million, and the one across the street came up with the earth being 42 years old. So we put the 4 billion one in the science book cuz it was bigger.
Multiply by 3600 sec/hour and you will see that one light-hour is about 671 million miles.
So if a supernova shockwave is moving at 45 million miles an hour, that's 45/671 or about 6.7% the speed of light in a vaccuum.
It works in metric too of course..
1 light-second is about 300,000 km/s (a third of a million km/s)
1 light-hour is then about 1000 million km/s, and 72/1000 or 7/100 gives you about 0.07c.
So next time you see a number of million kilometers per hour from CNN you can just divide it by ten and that is the percentage of the speed of light.
I think when we talk about this scale of velocity we need something better than "million miles/kilometers per second" and more tangible than a fraction of c.
1 milli-light = 1 mc = 0.001 c = 1 million km/sec = 0.67 million miles = 1 gigameter.
It is useful for CNN and promotion of space to the public because instead of saying "72 million km per hour" (which should be 72 gigameters/hour which abbreviated would unfortunately look like gram-meters/hour..)
..You can just say 72 milli-lights.
2) Switch to Euro
3) ???
4) Profit !!!
Check this out. I have a friend who's fired a number of them off, he says that they're every bit as impressive as the website claims.
Unfortunatly, I don't have enough money to buy ~600 sparklers, so no bomb this fourth. :(
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''The article says that the "small" fragments in the picture are tens of times bigger that our solar system, but that the star was only 15-25 times the size of our sun. (see quote below)
..."
/. leachers.
I may be doing the math all wrong, but doesn't that mean that the fragments are bigger than the star from which the blew off?
"Near the top of the image are dozens of tiny clumps of matter that used to be small fragments of the dead star. Each clump is tens of times larger than the diameter of our solar system.
The star itself was 15 to 25 times larger than the sun,
Posting as AC because I lost my nic and I'm sick of spam from
Allan
It's more likely to be from Mad Magazine where many of the jokes and articles are "From the $foo Department".
Mad Magazine remains one of the few credible printed journals left in the US (and apart from the "National Inquirer" it's probably the only decent publication sill out there). Go grab a copy!
OK, to clarify, I'm asking if the specific dept (the explosion-of-a-thousand-suns dept.) was inspired by The Court of a Thousand Suns. Although I do appreciate the explanation involving MAD magazine. It's been a while since I've read that.
When converting to meters per second from meters per hour, you'll want to divide by 3600, not times by 3600.
Just in case you weren't joking, I thought I'd clear that up...
Let's not stir that bag of worms...