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Scientists Accurately Predict Supernova
sckienle writes "Space.com has an article about a group of scientists who accurately predicted when the light of a supernova would reach Earth. (Ok, so they were only days ahead of the burst.) But this goes a fair way to confirming their model of supernovae."
I have to agree, I wondered how they could predict when light from an event they haven't seen, so don't know has occurred, will be detected. All they have done is join the dots, to form the line that the gamma burst precedes the supernova, and both are caused by the same event. So they are predicting a change in the dominant frequency of light rather than the arrival of it.
However this is good evidence for their model, when it isn't known that lightning caused thunder to paraphrase. The line they've drawn dramatically points to the Cannonball theory as being accurate.
Reading the linked article "Cosmic Cannon: How an Exploding Star Could Fry Earth", I'm left thinking... So what? It's not like there's anything we could even dream about doing about it, except maybe get off the planet so all our eggs aren't in one basket, and that isn't going to happen (a viable colony that can surive forever without us) for a long, long time. So, why even worry about it? If it happens, we won't even know it, except maybe briefly.