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A Supernova In Red/Blue Plaid, Please
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.
"
That's alot of Blam
"Most supernovae are industrial accidents."
So this actually happened 140 million years ago...
Slashdot is just now reporting on it? News from the 'mysterious future', indeed.
/sig
*Boom*
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
From what I remember in Astronomy class, the only known way blackholes are known to form are after a supernova explosion. This can make for an interesting study on blackholes.
Breaking News:
SCO has announced that is has claim to all IP related to supernovae. SCO claims it bought the rights to view and reproduce all supernovae images from NASA back in 1996. Another suit, targetted against the Catholic Church is insurance in case there really is a God that created the supernovae. If so, then God will be part of a future lawsuit.
Being that NASA uses UNIX computers to do much of it's work, SCO is also including IBM, Novell, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson as defendents in the filings.
Further updates as we get them.
Trolling is a art,
For those of you who dislike the New York Times subscription requirement, here is a link to a google news search of related articles.
Nothing, unless that cluster is where the Star Wars galaxy is. Then it'll prolly sound like BOOOOM. :-)
This was covered two days ago by space.com. They have pictures and good for people who didn't register on NYT.
Please direct all bug reports to
The History of the World. (Score:1, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on 23:58 Saturday 24 May 2003 (#6032631)
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
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336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
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A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
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A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt pa
the supermassive blackholes found near the centers of some (most?) galaxies are not (as far as we /know/) formed from a supernova explosion.
If I recall correctly...
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
Although two factories have been built, and ISO certified, they are still looking for a suitable shipping entity with hubs in all five local galaxies. The Domestic Project Manager, Color Supernova Commercial Division, Rich Fortuna, was quoted as saying "All it takes is one damaged-in-transit supernova and this entire circus is history."
Previous attempts at supernova mass production have met with failed rollouts and buyer chagrin. It is hoped that when all seven of these new style star factories are online, 3 and 4 G supernova will be readily available throughout this part of the Universe.
Step 2: One alien says, "Imaging a Beowulf cluster of these...."
Step 3: BOOM!
I knew it! Those prophetic Gallagher brothers in Oasis predicted the whole thing!
Oh, my bad, that's only for non-subscribers.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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...
Other sites have pictures as well as not needing registration.
Obligatory quote:
Barf: What the hell was that?
Lone Starr: Spaceball 1.
Barf: They've gone to plaid.
there are plenty of cows
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Sounds like a alpha galaxy (1 crash/bang every 2 years). Our galaxy (the milky way) sounds like beta galaxy (1 crash/bang every 100 years). Hopefully there's a stable galaxy out there somewhere :)
-?-
1. What is the yield of this process technology?
2. Does this yield go up as the process matures?
3. Does Moore's Law apply to supernova production?
4. Can you get a refund/exchange on dud supernovas, or do they just provide firmware updates?
5. Are supernovas legal for use in 4th of July celebrations in states that otherwise permit fireworks?
6. Does the EPA regulate supernovas, or do they fall under BATF?
7. Do you need a CCW permit to carry a concealed supernova?
8. Are supernova futures traded on the NASDAQ yet?
9. Have the Democrats figured out a way to tax supernovas (since they fall in the highest out-go bracket)?
10. Have the Republicans managed to regulate what supernovas can do in the privacy of their own interstellar gas clouds?
11. Can the RIAA/MPAA use the DMCA to sue supernovas suspected of being P2P traders?
Yes, where are the real answers?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It's simple. Just replace the "www" in the url with "archive" and you'll never need to register. Of course, you'll have to find the article when you get there.
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."
Sounds pretty awesome.
I was going to say, "Sounds like a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." Then I realized that the frequent huge doses of ionizing radiation would probably wreak havoc on television reception and other things. So maybe it's not even a nice place to visit. And I'm just sure I couldn't live there for very long.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
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
NY Times access without having to register:
Username: slashdot.com
Password: slashdot.com
Hopefully that will work for a whole mass of people logging in. Easy to remember. Take that, NYT >:) Pass it along.
The book describes a species of aliens who see in many more colors than we do. One color, commonly found in sunsets, is translated into English as "plaid."
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend it. It's arguably the best book by one of the brightest authors out there. He's the only author where I can't find anything to quibble about concerning his computer science. [Sample Chapter]
The universe did not have a "source point" where all matter spewed from in the big bang. Instead, its space itself that expands and carries everything along with it in more or less an even pace.
Use a balloon as an analogy. Take a balloon before blowing it up and use a felt-tip marker to put lots of dots on it. The dots represent galaxies and the balloon the fabric of space. Now blow up the balloon. All the dots recede from each other evenly, even though there is no source point. While you may think of the center of the balloon as a source point, it isn't really, because it exists outside the normal 2 dimensions of the surface of the balloon.
Increase all the dimensions by 1 and you have the situation you do in the universe. Space itself is expanding. Thus since everything has not been thrown out from a source point, there is plenty of time for gravity to pull together galaxies over great distances. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces but its effect stretches over the longest distance.
Also, when galaxies collide, in most cases there is very little star-to-star collisions, since there is so much empty space between the individual stars. What happens is the interplay of gravity between the stars warps the overall structure of the galaxy, which can have the effect of either stripping it of starmaking material and thus lead to the slow death of the galaxy, or concentrating it and leading to bursts of stellar births (and deaths, if the generated stars are very high mass and burn throught their hydrogen quickly).
Hope this helps a little.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
First off the space.com story alternated between calling the galaxy Arp 229 and Arp 299 which totally confused my astronomer self.
.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. . . .
BUT. .
I hear that using sunblock rated at least SPF 3.4e+25 helps with that.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
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.
Sorry. I meant more than zero. I'm not sure how "less" got in there. I think that I was originally going to say "vacuum goes from perfect to less than perfect" but then I realized space wasn't a perfect vacuum, and changed to pressure from vacuum but didn't change the "less" to "more".
Now I hope hope I make more silly mistakes like that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
As usual, the Astronomy Picture Of the Day has a very nice picture and explination of this.
And as a bonus, today's APOD is one of the kewlest sunset pictures I've ever seen.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
> 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.