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A Supernova In Red/Blue Plaid, Please

Posted by Hemos on from the build-it-for-them dept.

Snotnose writes "The New York Times is reporting that scientists have found a a supernova factory . From the article, scientists estimated that the cluster alone, which contains up to a million stars, probably produces a supernova once every two years. That is a rate 50 times higher than usual in entire galaxies. Stars explode in Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way, only once in a century.. Sounds pretty awesome. "

8 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Old News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apparently the New York Times likes to plagarize... Bill Bryson's new book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" devotes a few pages in chapter 13 to Arp 299 and even calls it a "Supernova Factory." Interesting...

  2. Why this is important... by pq · · Score: 5, Interesting
    So I'm seeing lots of funny stuff, but no serious comments. Okay, we knew about supernovae, and we knew that where there is star formation, sooner or later there will be star death and supernovae as well. No freaking big deal, right?

    The surprise here is the rate of supernovae going off in that tiny volume. One cluster, one million stars, and a supernova every two years. In our galaxy, we're still waiting for one since the days of Galileo and Tycho, probably an average rate of one every century or so. And this is with Billions and Billions (TM) of stars in our galaxy!

    So that is a pretty big surprise. And it is a VLBA result: very cool. (The standard analogy for the VLBA resolution is the ability to pick out Roosevelt's eye on a dime held up in LA while you are standing in New York...)

    --
    "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
  3. Re:In space? by istartedi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, when the gas goes by the pressure goes from zero to something less than zero. The supernova does indeed have a sound, and it probably is some kind of "boom" full of turbulent white noise. Of course, that sound never reaches us in any meaningful way, and if it did we'd probably all be dead.

    IIRC, one of the NASA probes once recorded the sound caused by interractions in the rarified gas associated with Jupiter's intense magnetic fields.

    So yes, there are indeed acoustic waves in space. It's just that they aren't like the atmospheric waves we are used to. That doesn't mean they aren't sound. You can't hear very well under water, but dolphins can. You wouldn't say that the ocean is silent just because humans have lousy hearing there. Likewise, we shouldn't say that space is silent just because the pressure is extremely low and we'd immediately die there.

    That said, given that space is almost a vacuum, you can't produce sound in the usual manner. You have to introduce a gas into space that allows sound to propogate, and a supernova does just that.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  4. zerg by Lord+Omlette · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone remember that episode of Andromeda where some evil dictator acquires weapons of mass destruction that can take out entire stars? Maybe that's what's going on there, they're just testing & stuff...

    --
    [o]_O
  5. conway's game of life? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    does this remind anyone of conway's game of life? eg, how first they discovered "persistent" creatures, like:
    ***
    *
    *
    and then later discovered factories that produced such creatures? of course, that leads into "what about factories that produce these 'supernova factories'? where do they get their materials from? ...perhaps from the cast-off remains of exploded supernovae? if so, have we discovered a stellar ecosystem? no doubt others have considered this...


    ruriruri
    www.redsails.org

  6. Other reasons Arp 299 is interesting. . . by astrobabe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First off the space.com story alternated between calling the galaxy Arp 229 and Arp 299 which totally confused my astronomer self.

    BUT. . .Arp 299 is one of the galaxies calssified as a starburst galaxy, meaning we see lots of star formation going on in Arp 299. People saw how much star formation with ISO and we'll be looking at it with SIRTF after we launch. It's thought that supernovae can trigger star formation by the shocks from the explosion disturbing the gas clouds and making them unstable. Of course the multiwavelength data is needed to test this theory and this radio data combined with the optical and infrared will be a good first start. . . .

  7. Factory of what?!? by BitHerder · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm probably picking nits here, but doesn't it sound odd to speak of a "supernova factory"? It makes as much sense as a moldy bread factory or a worn tire factory. A supernova is the death of a star after a long life, it makes no sense to suggest that this cluster is stamping 'em out. Better to say that at one time this was a star factory, producing shiny new stars which are/were dying at relatively the same time.

  8. Re:Okay smart guys by hesiod · · Score: 2, Interesting

    > Why is it that if the production rate of supernovae is one ever two years, that there aren't thousands or millions of supernovae in that cluster to be observed?

    Ummm, IANAM(athemetician), but I would think that if something happens once every 500 days or so, and the supernova takes maybe a year (guess) to complete, that there would only 1-3 visible at any given (average) time.

    Unless, after a supernova happened, you would be able to "see it" for a thousand years.

    That brings up an interesting question that most people here probably know: How long does the whole process take? After it has collapsed and starts to explode, how long is it visible? And I don't mean "visible" in the night sky - I am talking about telescopes of course.