Slashdot Mirror
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."
You know I needs that sweet FP, B!
Which kind of raises the question, why not a meganova, or a giganova?
jeez, silly names...
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
I really sorry, but I've never had the opportunity to do a first post before. I;m sure by the time I get this up here, it shall be too late, but what the hell. Thank you all for your understanding.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
first post
Hide in your basesment and get out your tinfoil hat! ...I'm glad to see many of you are already prepared.
And it was just about to retire the next day. 2 billion years of loyal service as a hypernova, and it erupts just like that.
Quoted a co-worker, "It's what we call in the nova business retirony."
-Look lively. LOOK LIVELY!!! --Mr. Shmallow
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.
Wonderful...an intense gamma ray burst. I wonder how much this increases my chances of getting cancer...?
The domain name www.jessicalynch.org was registered on March 17th, 2003 - six days before the US Private was allegedly captured!
"Black hole" indeed.
_________
cheap web site hosting - now with extra donuts.
Try clicking here for a mirror.
"Billlllyuns and billlllyuns of years ago..."
And the brethren went away edified.
This happened 2 Billion years ago.
Slow news day?
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."
And five minutes later, after someone accidentally spilled coffee on Dr. Akerlof, angering him, he was quoted as saying... wait for it... wait for it... all together now...
HULK SMASH!!!
Let the painfully immature gamma ray jokes begin.
Announcement: OperaSoftware has released Opera 7.1 betas. Please test and submit any bugs. Thank you for making Opera a better product.
Announcement For Windows
Announcement For Linux
Let's just hope we don't get one of these anywhere much closer than this, cause otherwise everyone will have a really good sun tan very fast!
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio -- Iraqi general "Chemical" Ali Hassan Al Majid was found dead in the rubble of his Basra home this morning. No further details were available. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him. Even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his ground-breaking efforts in the fields of chemical warfare and genocide. Beloved by the anti-war activists and homicidal megalomaniacs everywhere, he will be missed. Truly an Iraqi icon.
so much for the article's technical credibility: gamma particles are extensively referenced at the end of the first section.
It seems that the author couldn't make up his mind as he also talks about gamma rays later on.
Now, as far as I know, gammas are commonly referred to as rays, so either the author feels like rubbing wave/particle duality into us, or he doesn't really understand what he's writing about, or, of course, I could be way off base here and people do really talk about gamma particles.
(for those who might be confused, gamma rays are products of nuclear decay, but as opposed to protons and electrons [alpha and beta radiation], they don't pack rest mass hence their common reference as gamma rays).
ROTSE isn't in any way associated with GOATSE, is it?
:-D
I do NOT want to see another goatse picture
Reality: Windows NT 4.0 Outperforms Linux On Common Customer Workloads The Linux community claims to have improved performance and scalability in the latest versions of the Linux Kernel (2.2), however it's clear that Linux remains inferior to the Windows NT® 4.0 operating system.
For File and Print services, according to independent tests conducted by PC Week Labs, the Windows NT 4.0 operating system delivers 52 percent better performance on a single processor system and 110 percent better performance on a 4-way system than similarly configured single processor and 4-way Linux/SAMBA systems. ( For print services, the bottleneck is not with the spooling speed to the server but in the output speed on the printer )
For Web servers, the same PC Week tests showed Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivers 41 percent better performance on a single processor system and 125 percent better performance on a 4-way system than Linux and Apache. ( There were two problems with these results. Firstly, they only took into account static HTML page content. Most web sites use CGI to generate dynamic content - Linux beats NT at doing this. Secondly, almost no internet sites use 100Mb Ethernet for their connection. Linux Apache can saturate a 10Mb line even with low end hardware so the "performance" figures are only of interest to high end server farms etc where the competition is Solaris, not Linux See http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/mstest.html )
For e-commerce workloads using secure sockets (SSL), recent PC Magazine tests showed Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivers approximately five times the performance provided by Linux and Stronghold. (SSL is about security not speed.)
For transaction-orientated Line of Business applications, Windows NT 4.0 has achieved a result of 40,368 tpmC at a cost of $18.46 per transaction on a Compaq 8-Way Pentium III XEON processor-based system. This industry leading price/performance result from the transaction processing council clearly shows how Windows NT can deliver world-class performance for heavy duty transaction processing. It's interesting to note that there is not a single TPC result on any database running on Linux, and therefore Linux has yet to demonstrate their capabilities as a database server. (See note on POSIX compliancy below.)
Linux performance and scalability is architecturally limited in the 2.2 Kernel. Linux only supports 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM on the x86 architecture,1 compared to 4 GB for Windows NT 4.0. (Please read the footnote carefully.) The largest file size Linux supports is 2 GB versus 16 terabytes (TB) for Windows NT 4.0. The Linux SWAP file is limited to 128 MB RAM. In addition, Linux does not support many of the modern operating system features that Windows NT 4.0 has pioneered such as asynchronous I/O, completion ports, and fine-grained kernel locks. These architecture constraints limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors. (Linux generally uses swap partitions, not swap files. In 2.2 kernels, their maximum size is not limited to 128MB per partition, so this is just plain wrong. However, even in 2.0 kernels one could create as many 128MB partitions as limited by the partition table on the disk. In either case, its still possible to use a swap file in which case the limit is simply the maximum file size supported by the OS. The 2gb limit is for x86 architecture only. Linux running on the Alpha platform supports much much more. As for OS features, Linux has always used cutting edge technology but not at the cost of increased size. The "core" NT system is several Megabytes but Linux, due to it's modular nature, is never over 1 meg in size. A Linux kernel over 500k is considered big. NT's lumbering size means that it will never be reliable: bigger program, more bugs.)
The Linux community continues to promise major SMP and performance improvements. They have been promising these since the development of the 2.0 Kernel in 1996. Delivering a scalable system is a complex task and it's not clear
This is much better than that. I want to hear about this hizzonova. Or the shizzonova.
I think that black holes should be explored by brilliant popstars. (Lance Bass from NSYNC) Anyone have any other suggestions for tourists to this final destination?
http://www.basstronaut.com/news.html
** KARMA WHORE MODE: OFF **
Hypernova Blast:
Global Chase Ensues
based on U. Michigan release
Two billion years ago, in a far-away galaxy, a giant star exploded, releasing almost unbelievable amounts of energy as it collapsed to a black hole. The light from that explosion finally reached Earth at 6:37 a.m. EST on March 29, igniting a frenzy of activity among astronomers worldwide. This phenomenon has been called a hypernova, playing on the name of the supernova events that mark the violent end of massive stars.
With two telescopes separated by about 110 degrees longitude, the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE) will have one of the most continuous records of this explosion.
The changing intensity of a gamma-ray burst. On the left is an image of the gamma ray sky showing the burst becoming the brightest object. On the right is a plot of the changing brightness with time. The first gamma-ray burst was seen in the year 1967 (although it was not reported to the world until 1973) by satellite-borne detectors intended to look for violations of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Credit: BATSE
"The optical brightness of this gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before. It's also much closer to us than all other observed bursts so we can study it in considerably more detail," said Carl W. Akerlof, an astrophysicist in the Physics Department at the University of Michigan.
Contrary to visible light, gamma rays are non-thermal meaning that they are not produced in hot celestial bodies like the sun. Gamma rays occur in exceptional circumstances such as in the aftermath of a stellar explosion, in the vicinity of black holes, or at the core of active galaxies.
Just recently, the ROTSE group commissioned two optical telescopes in Australia and Texas and were waiting for the first opportunities to use the new equipment. The burst was promptly detected by NASA's Earth orbiting High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE-2) but human intervention was required to find the exact location.
Despite sporadic clouds and rainstorms in Australia, the ROTSE instrument at Siding Spring Observatory in northern New South Wales was able to record the decaying light from the blast. Twelve hours later, the second ROTSE telescope in Fort Davis, Texas was picking up the job of monitoring this spectacular explosion.
"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. If you concentrated all the energy that the sun will put out over its entire 9 billion-year life into a tenth of a second, then you would have some idea of the brightness," said Michael Ashley, faculty member in the astrophysics and optics department at the University of New South Wales and a member of the ROTSE team.
Given that the history of astronomy goes back centuries, observations in the gamma spectrum are really among the newest areas in celestial research. The high-energy light is swallowed by the earth's atmosphere yet the light cannot be captured with conventional lenses or mirrors. Special detectors in satellites and high altitude research rockets register gamma rays with energies of up to around ten billion electron volts.
Gamma rays occur in exceptional circumstances such as in the aftermath of a stellar explosion, in the vicinity of black holes, or at the core of active galaxies. Credit: NASA
Fortunately for life on earth, a gamma particle from the universe does not penetrate to the earth's surface, but if it flies past an atomic nucleus within the earth's atmosphere, the gamma particle can transform itself into an electron and its (positive) antiparticle, a positron. During its journey through the air, this pair comes across more atomic nuclei and a gamma quantum is generated which then once again hits atomic nuclei. Thus, a single cosmic gamma particle creates roughly a thousand secondar
cMDR tACO is teh GHEY!
hmm im scared to click on their home page :-)
How much longer do we have to reach the Ringworld?! We need the new hyperdrive NOW!
Sig master! Sig master! Sig... faster?!
"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..."
yeah, but if it were september would we even know it happened?
IANAA but, it seems that even if you always have someone looking into the night sky, it's only half of the sky - you cant see the side where the sun is untill later in the year.
now if we could somehow drop a satellite telescope behind in orbit around the sun about 6 months behind us and another 3 months behind (for line of sight comms) we could get a more complete picture of our neiborhood year round.
or...i could be completly ignorant.
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.
... Nova...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This story reminds me of the other day at the arcade... A little kid challenged me to a game of Mortal Wombat and for a while I was like getting thrashed so I said like "Hey, all three super bars ar filled!" and bam! Rotated into a crouch and slapped left+right+punch+punch+kick and laid him out with my character's Hypernova finishing move...
What..? Astronomy???
You need a FREE iPod Nano
get it, rotc vs. rotse
rimshot!
How about ananova...no wait that's a website...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
"If you concentrated all the energy that the sun will put out over its entire 9 billion-year life into a tenth of a second, then you would have some idea of the brightness."
The key phrase here is then you would have some idea. Frankly, there is a point in astronomy and astrophysics where things get so big, and so fast, and so bright, that the only idea that remains in one's brain when trying to imagine such phenomena is a white light with a big hand reaching into it. The example above is classic: first I have to imagine 9 billion years (good luck, I can't even remember what happened yesterday) and then I have to imagine a tenth of a second, which is like a total brain fart. And then, and only then, would I have some idea of the brightness. Well, I guess that I would have some idea if my head hadn't imploded while trying to imagine that nanofart called a "tenth of a second." Geezus.
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
Fortunately, they didn't call their telescope network the Global Optical Automatic Transient Search Experiment, whose headquarter are in the Christmas Islands.
cancer of the colon?
"Two billion years ago, in a far-away galaxy, a giant star exploded."
The death of star. Death Star.
I predict they might be seeing a second one of these explosions any time soon...
Nevermind.
Is the quoted speaker the Rotse man? Rotse.cx?
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Not offtopic, just think about the name they chose for their telescope network!
IF we put Bill Gates in the middle of the explosion, will he get rip to shreds? Nah, he'll probably monopolize and patents the explosions.
Would it increase your changes of getting cancer? Shields that reduce gamma ray intensity by 50% include 1cm (0.4 inches) of lead, 6cm (2.4 inches) of concrete or 9cm (3.6 inches) of packed dirt. On the good side, gamma radiation is only as harmful as x-ray or beta particles. This NASA site however says that most gamma radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, which is why you need balloons or sattelites to really see gamma rays.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
I've been staring at this thing for three days now. It's in a filed crowed with galaxies of every shape.
/. blog a few days ago.
I wrote about it in my
He must be so proud. I'm sure that "the whole world is watching Australia!", and that this event will "finally put Australia on the map!"...
too bad
ur a loser!
This Gamma Ray Burst news got to amateur astronomers within hours of its detection on 29th of March. It was also the first GRB to be observed visually as can be seen from AAVSO's report. The observers were deep-sky enthuasts from Finland.The equipment used was amateur level telescopes and eyeballs.
So they used the new ROTSE telescope. Has anyone heard of the GOATSE telescope? Yeah it's exclusively used for peering into massive black holes.
Is it an erupting hypernova?
or
Is it aliens shooting at us?
"gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before", Yep aliens for sure.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
'Contrary to visible light, gamma rays are non-thermal meaning that they are not produced in hot celestial bodies like the sun. Gamma rays occur in exceptional circumstances such as in the aftermath of a stellar explosion, in the vicinity of black holes, or at the core of active galaxies'
This is of course not true - gamma rays are produced in many places, among other things by Radium, if my memory serves me. And the Sun does indeed produce gamma rays are essentially just high energy photons, just like visible light (and radio waves, for that matter) with 'high energy'. Electromagnetic radiation is quantified in 'packets' called photons, and it is mostly a metter of taste whether you call them radio waves, microwaves, light, X-rays or gamma rays. There's an upper for gamma photons by the way (sort of): a photon with very high energy will tend to 'split' and form a pair consisting of an electron and a positron, which then annihilate in a burst of photons.
It mentioned the infamous rotse.cx site!
"The remarkable Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment [ROTSE] telescopes have tracked a 2 billion year old hypernova, . . ."
Is there any relationship between this and the GOATSE blackhole?
.. a beowulf cluster of that!!
Is there any way we could spin this news to make people believe Saddam Hussein is behind this one as well...?
"The optical brightness of this gamma ray burst is about 100 times more intense than anything we've ever seen before."
Aren't gamma rays by definition not optical (i.e. not in the visible spectrum)?
the coolest club on
My journal, its better then yours :p
That made no sense.
Some people make no sense.
Yay.:)
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.
Rotse. I swear every and any word/acronym/setofcharacters containing o*tse or some form of it has, in my mind, been ruined forever. My first day at slashdot will continue haunt me to the end of my days.
Thank you.
Note: This sig contains nine S's, nine I's and five O's which... means absolutely nothing.
I'd suggest they register a .cx domain name instead of .net ...
I suggest we remove that galaxy from our list of places to go to when we have FTL - I doubt there is much life left after an event like this happens in your galaxy.
Even give 2 billion years to recover, I'll bet that galaxy is just a bit thin on life.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Quoth the article:
Fortunately for life on earth, a gamma particle from the universe does not penetrate to the earth's surface, but if it flies past an atomic nucleus within the earth's atmosphere, the gamma particle can transform itself into an electron and its (positive) antiparticle, a positron.
Now, im in an entry level college physics course right now, and we're doing electromagentic stuff, and we jsut learned that gamma radiation is just that--ionising radiation. EM wave, no particle. What's the article talking about? Something I havent learned yet?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
And to think, I only just duct taped up my house last month. Whew!
that explains why I turn slightly green every time I get angry, now.
"now if we could somehow drop a satellite telescope behind in orbit around the sun about 6 months behind us..."
From what I understand, there's already a spaceship in that precise location.
Karma: NaN
I don't care about cancer ... does this increase my chances of getting superpowers? Then I'd just have to find a tailor who can provide rip-proof purple pants ....
Since when does 10 times 100 get 10000? More like 1000.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Lisa: "But you have recruiting ads on TV. Why do you need subliminal messages?"
Navy guy: "It's a three-pronged attack. Subliminal, liminal, and superliminal."
Lisa: "Superliminal?"
Navy Guy: "I'll show you. Hey you! Join the navy!"
Lenny and Carl: "Uh, yeah, alright." "I'm in."
25 or 30 years ago, when Pulsars were a relatively new phenomenon, I attended a presentation at the old McLaughlin Planetarium, where the presenter gave a very memorable presentation. He was explaining how the Crab Nebula could contain a pulsar, without us ever noticing.
He projected a flashing light on to the simulcrm of the sky. And he had a tone generator generating ticks in synch with the flashing light. Then he turned up the frequency of the flashes. The flashes all blended into one continuous light long before the ticks became indistinguishable. My recollection was that it took about three times the frequency before the ticks blended together. Okay -- it made an impression on me.
i spent 5 minutes composing my pedantic comment about how the quote is ' ... the sun never SETS ... ' (on the British Empire)
then i realized: it's astronomy !!! it happens at night !!!
help me ... i need a life
+1 fashionably cynical
...SETI@home reports that they've finally gotten an intelligible signal from that area of the sky. The message came in just before the nova.
After decoding, it said, "Hey, Zborno, what's this button do?"
If you put them at the Lagrange points, some of them will shoot off rapidly. They're not all stable, you know.
YOU FAIL IT!
and a couple super computers and stuck em where the sun don't shine. haha
pretty neat, outrunning the sunrise every night.
yuou could say this system is faster than the speed of light, but you'd really only be faster than the speed of the earth's rotation.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Perhaps this is some alien species' way of saying "Hey! We're over here!!!". Generating a great big blast of light without destroying the entire galaxy. What a great (and far advanced) idea!
Now let's hope they aren't sending us a message in Morse code. Hehe..
blargle flargle argle?
Get within 500 light years of that sucker ...
oh well sunscreen spf 2*28