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Hubble Snaps Pix Of Dying Supernova

Posted by Hemos on from the explosion-of-a-thousand-suns dept.

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!

2 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Cas A is interesting for other reasons. . . by astrobabe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  2. Millions of Miles and a Metric Trick by mattr · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Everyone knows light travels at 186,282 miles per second. At least I've known that since elementary school, nearly 30 years ago.

    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.