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Hypernova Erupts as Global Telescopes Scramble
An anonymous reader writes "The remarkable Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment [ROTSE] telescopes have tracked a 2 billion year old hypernova, from which an intense gamma ray burst reached earth on March 29. From Carl Akerlof, the ROTSE investigator: "The optical brightness of this gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before." To underscore how the sun never rises on this automated telescope network, the observations switched rapidly from New South Wales in Australia back to Fort Davis, Texas, over a 12 hour burnout of the collapsing black hole."
yeah, anyway... "During the first minute after the explosion it emitted energy at a rate more than a million times the combined output of all the stars in the Milky Way" This is completely unimaginable. I just wonder: has anything on this scale has been observed before?
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
Can you think of a better way to say "REALLY REALLY BIG SUPERNOVA" in one word and without the caps? IMO, this makes sense: we have a switch from Latin to Greek in the prefix, which means whatever follows is more awesome. It's definitely more proper than your silly projected transition to "mega" and "giga", which are generally accepted numerical prefixes and therefore unrelated and not usable here.
Hilarious, the little animated skymap showing the
burst becoming the brightest thing in the sky was
produced by EGRET... Which ceased operations several
years ago. Whatever they are showing in that figure,
it can't be real data.
The first of the four images from hubble of the event is about 2 light years across I figure the last of the 4 images they say is 6 light years across.
Problem is this only happened in March so how did it expand 4 light years in like a few months and how exactly did that expansion happen when some how the burst just reached us over that distance.
Anyone see a problem here? It expands 4 light years in size in just a few months yet some how the light manages to travel 2 billion light years.
I can't see how this could have happened, Iv'e been thinking about it since it was posted as APOD picture of the day a few days ago.
Expansion faster then the speed of light? It don't make sence to me.
You mean like this one:
Possible Hypernova Could Affect Earth
This might be old news but its certainly *big* news. It's just that the post is a little slow around here (i.e. 3x10^8 m/s).
Being big news, it certainly raises some interesting questions:
1). Given the enormous power output of this burst ("more than a million times the combined output of all the stars in the Milky Way" for at least a minute, then falling off) what effect would this have had on any organic life in that galaxy? More specifically, could anything bigger than a bacterium have survived?
2). Are there any hypernova candidates in our own galaxy or the local Magellanic clouds?
3). If there are, how much warning will we get before they go off?
4). Assuming only technologies which don't contravene our current understanding of physics, how long would take us to retreat to a safe distance (the intergalactic void presumably)?
One can only suspect that this might be one of those theoretical (until now) pan-galactic sterilizing "reset" events. Which might settle the debate over the Fermi paradox once and for all.
There are absolutely massive numbers involved that it's difficult to realistically comprehend them let alone compare them meaningfully.
Co-incidentally, I worked out for someone tonight that if the Sun and the Earth were 5 centimetres apart (that's a couple of inches), then the Andromeda galaxy would be roughly 6.7 million kilometres down the road. (About 4 million miles.) And Andromeda's one of the closest of what was most recently estimated to be around 80 billion galaxies.
Since the proposed mechanism is a nova (supernove?) that occurs next to a black hole, I don't see any intrinsic reason that they shouldn't still be possible. Or why all such events should be of similar brightness. Or any easy way to put a limit on just how bright it could get.
OTOH, perhaps the radiation wouldn't be emitted symmetrically. In that case it seem likely that there could be parts of the galaxy that would survive. But just suppose that a large black hole was quite nearby when S-Doradus choose to go supernove. You might be able to calculate a limit on how bright that could be, but I certainly couldn't.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.