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Supernova Imaged by Hubble Telescope
Delta Vel writes "First discovered by a Japanese amateur astronomer on July 31, this Type II supernova was imaged by Hubble on August 17th. The newly named SN 2004 dj, the closest supernova to be observed in over ten years, is about 11 million light-years away in the spiral galaxy NGC 2403. Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images." Reader Saeed al-Sahaf writes "Today, astronauts Gennady Padalka and Mike Fincke popped open the hatch on the Russian side of the ISS spacecraft and quickly stepped through the fourth and final spacewalk of their six-month mission. Their mission? Install three antennas and replace a 2-foot-square Russian pump panel. But of course, because it isn't a part or our Mission to Mars, it is still too dangerous work on the Hubble Telescope, which after all, is only used for science."
It's about time they got a bittorrent server in space.
The RIAA is now building a rocket which can be sent into space to deliver a cease and desist order to supernova to stop piracy once and for all.
PS. No, I didn't rtfa.
Hi there
They'll put any old thing up, this happened 11 million years ago for God's sakes.
why run from Vincenzo?
naked eye. That would be unusual. Has it reached it's peak brilliance yet? I know that takes several days.
Simon's Rock College
No sig, sorry.
The Suprnova stronly resembled a large collection of pirated games, moveies, and Television shows. Later confirmation sightings revealed it to be not in fact Suprnova, but only a mirror.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
UC Berkeley's NewsCenter has a nice article about this. The astronomer is from UC Berkeley.
AHA! CONSPIRACY! This also means we didn't actually land on the moon, and lends credence to my little-green-men-at-roswell theory. Not the alien autopsy though, that was just nonsense.
Please help metamoderate.
Even better on an intergalactic level.
I'm kind of disappointed though. I was hoping it would be background worthy.
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
"Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images."
I don't think so. Looking at the pics its the same one in both. I think the submitter is confused as there is a large similar looking nebula in the south-east (bottom left, which *is* south-east)
Not for the dialup dudes, but great for broadband buddies:
/ a/formats/full_jpg.jpg
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2004/23/images
>But of course, because it isn't a part or our Mission to Mars, it is
>still too dangerous work on the Hubble Telescope, which after all, is
>only used for science."
>
Everybody excoriated NASA for not flying to the station, not paying attention to safety, not getting the Air Force to look, etc, etc. They came up with the safe haven plan to address those concerns, way to go NASA. Then someone noticed it was going to end up not saving Hubble. All of a sudden, what the hell, take a chance, don't you guys have any guts?
You can't take both bold chances, and ensure perfect safety, at the same time. Particularly to save a 20-year-old telescope with a spotty reliability record, a replacement plan in progress, and better telescopes on the ground.
The way I understand it, a super nova would explode like a nuclear bomb in the air, that is, in all directions, so shoulded the upper right image be the correct one? Nebulas are like the foreground objects, often like wisps of fog. They are either the birthing ground of stars or a _long_ ago remnant of a super nova.
...because it is in another galaxy.
If it were in our own galaxy then it would have a chance of being visible.
"full_jpg.jpg" Who comes up with this shit?
They arrows are fine... You just have to realize that the first images have the majority of the galaxy cropped out... They are only showing NGC 2403-1, instead of the large NGC 2403.
-Bill
Propz to the Nasa guys for marking some of the images with the earths relative polar position. This should come in handy if I ever get lost in space!
Skype Me! username: john_allen_mohammed
What I would want to see is one that lights up the night as if it were day. Heard that happened once, would love to see it with my own eyes.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Anyone else kinda glad that the supernova in question is in a "nearby galaxy" (nearby is a relative term, obviously) rather than our galaxy? If it can be mistaken for a local star at that distance, imagine what it would be like up close and personal.
Ok, I'll bite, rather than mod you -1 troll.
1) Age isn't necessarily a bad thing with a telescope. Lots of telescopes are a lot older than that - witness the Anglo-Australian Telescope, the UK Schmidt Telescope, and the recently burned-down Great Melbourne Telescope (aka MSSSO 50") which provided evidence that the universe is accelerating.
oh yeah, and hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 - you do the maths.
2) The replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimised for the Infra-Red and can NOT operate in the blue/UV like hubble. Nor will it be launched until 2012, 4-5yrs *after* the prospective hubble death date.
JWST will also be at the L2 lagrange point, meaning that there is NO possibility of any servicing mission. here is info on the orbit.
3) There are NO better telescopes on the ground for imaging. Hubble has a *diffraction-limited* resolution of about 0.05" - 0.1" (0.05 - 0.1 arcsec). The BEST sites in the world (Mauna kea, cerro paranal) get seeing as good as 0.3-0.4" at the best of times, and that isn't too often.
No, adaptive optics do NOT help because they limit the field-of-view. Hubble has a diffraction limited FOV across the entire chip.
4) Hubble does not have to contend with atmospheric absorption, which makes observations in some bands (like the aforementioned UV) nigh on impossible.
Well, I guess it's only another 5 billion years til we get to see one REALLY up close.
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Messier object 1 (M1), more commonly known as the Crab Nebula, is a good example of a "Long ago" supernova remnant.
Crab Nebula Info
The star went supernova almost a thousand years ago, and that is whats left.
During the actual event of a supernova, though, the star (from so far away) only seems to go from being a normal star to an amazingly bright one, and then slowly dimming down over a few months (or years). The reason is because stars are so huge they cannot simply explode like in the movies, after all they are in a constant state of nuclear fusion!!
-Bill
Type Ia supernovae take about a month to reach their peak brightness. While this is a Type II, a different class of explosion, I think the timescale is comparable. Accoring to this page the supernova had an apparent visual magnitude of 11.3 in early August. This is a factor of 100 dimmer than the naked eye can see under the best conditions (magnitude 6 is the dimmest the unaided eye can see).
If you're unsure of why a higher number means a dimmer object, or just want more information, czech out the Wikipedia entry on visual magnitudes.
By the way, the last supernova that was visible to the naked eye was SN1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
If it really appeared as bright as the sun, but was coming from a star-sized pinpoint in the sky, that might be a little hard on the retinas if you looked at it directly.
Now, in the event you notice that the entire upper atmosphere has been turned into an orange smog by the gamma rays, then you know that the supernova was really too close for comfort. In that case, head down to your basement for a few years until the ozone comes back.
That noise you see are the gazillion of stars out there.
The rate of occurrence of supernovae in our own galaxy is now reasonably well determined to be one every 25 years. Supernova remnants in our own Galaxy and nearby galaxies are theoretically observable for over a million years.
I wonder what the residents of that now-ex-solar system thought? And perhaps that'd be a good section of the sky to look for messages in? Perhaps they saw it coming, and could only save "themselves" by broadcasting their technology to any civilization that could make use of it.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
You know there's something seriously wrong when you type in Supernova in Google and it asks you "Did you mean : Suprnova " ?
Too late for that. The message would have had to leave before the supernova, so it would have already passed us.
We'd have to go FTL a loooong way to look for any signal.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Which part of it did you build?
None of it, obviously, and such emotive appeals don't further your point, but thanks for the info. It still doesn't invalidate my point that 20 years is not particularly "old" for a telescope. Especially when it cost $US1.5billion. Hence all the servicing missions so far.
Is there any reason to believe JWST/NGST will cost significantly less than hubble? So lets estimate $US1-1.5billion all up. How much does a servicing mission cost to hubble (ignoring the fact that JWST will be at L2)? Something like a couple hundred million? I don't know the actual number, but that's what's in my head. (Do you know it? I'd like to know) The point: I'm *highly* skeptical of your "we just build a new one" claim. Prove it!
On the safety issue, I have no argument, because I completely agree with you there. A handful of astronauts died. Whilst tragic, so what? How many people die in cars or gun death in the US *every* day? Going to space is inherently dangerous! People die. It's sad, but it happens. Lots of astronauts have still volunteered to go anyway.
The cancelling of the original service mission was nothing other than political, as is this robotic service mission. Dumb and political, but O'keefe might get some mileage out of it, and by the time he pulls the plug entirely it'll be too late.
Incidentally, I don't buy into this public hysteria about "we have to save hubble" and all that crap. I'm just pissed COS got the arse, because I wanted to use it!
Venus can cast shadows and it is pretty bright but it doesn't make it as it were day. Neither full mooon, which is the brightest object in the sky by far but it makes the terrain visible pretty easily.
If they weren't native, then probably they had the means of travelling between star systems, no contest, it's just like a huge Florida evacuation, only 14 million times larger. :-)
Shuttle launches run to around US$500M (the actual cost is unclear, since it's never costed on a per-launch basis) - or at least they used to before all this extra safety stuff was added in. Assuming that NASA does actually manage to get shuttle operational again (which isn't guaranteed) the cost of an individual launch will probably be even higher than it used to be. Then you have to throw in the cost of the replacement hardware.
According to this the JWST will cost US$824.8M. That appears to include launch costs (Ariane V, so probably ~$100M), and operations (for 5-10 years). A large chunk of the cost of the telescope itself will be non-recurring engineering (i.e. design work). Assuming a build-to-print replacement telescope, you could probably do a replacement (with launch costs) for around $400M or less. So, less than a shuttle mission (neglecting the whole L2 issue), and no lives risked.
It still doesn't invalidate my point that 20 years is not particularly "old" for a telescope. Especially when it cost $US1.5billion.
By way of calibration: the Mars Exploration Rover mission cost just shy of a $1B, and will be lucky to last 2 years, let alone 20. Space isn't cheap.
With regard to repairing Hubble, there's only so much stuff you can repair/replace (without actually replacing the whole thing) before it succumbs to old age. It's not clear that it's cost-effective to do another servicing mission - you may save the gyros, only to have other stuff fail. Space is not a benign environment. The cumulative total radiation dose is slowly chewing thorugh HST's electronics (although I believe the last servicing mission replaced the onboard computer, other electronic devices onboard are still the originals), the micrometeoroid background is eating at its structure, the batteries are nearing the end of their cycle life, and the thermal system is slowly degrading as the optical properties of the HST exterior change due to micrometeroid strikes and solar UV. Let it die.
Incidentally, I'm no fan of the Bush Mars plan. I just think that all the noise over Hubble is driven as much by partisan politics as it is by scientific, engineering, and cost considerations.
so just a question,
how hard would it be to actually replace hubble with a similar yet much more modern instrument? And just how long would it take. Lets say we kept with the hubble design and just upgraded everything. Can you put a new hubble into orbit without a shuttle launch and if so, why not do that. It can't be that expensive to build a clone and this time they know what to generally expect. I'm no genius on this stuff but I was wondering if anyone had any reliable information on the prospects of saving hubble this way.
I would think having done it once, it could be done again faster and cheaper and with less things going wrong.
OMFG this l33t !!1111!1!!11oneeleven!!1! shit has got to stop. For all that his holy on slashdot plz quit the n00b1sh 11oneone crap or I'll have to start hunting each and every one of you down and 0wn j00 with my evil-bit encapsulated ICMP packet canon.
uNF
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Looks like they goofed in one of the images, though--the arrow points to a different bright spot on the before-and-after image than it does on the main and annotated images.
Look better. The two last images point to the same place. See the "small" galaxy or whatever at the bottom of the pointed supernova on the two last photos pointed on the quote. They're the same as the big one pointed on the first one, the photo has only been zoomed to that area.
Your head a splode
... how rare this is. The last real supernova was in the constellation Monoceros in the 1980s, and it was the first one since the invention of the telescope. That makes this the second.
There was an interesting article on spacedaily.com (The case against Hubble) which proposes that 2 new cheaper modern telescopes could be built for the price of "repairing" hubble.. I was in favour, until I heard about the costs.. Its had a damn good run, and will continue to do good science, but its like an old car that is costing more and more to put through its MOT each year..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
An "up close and personal" supernova might have been responsible for the Cambrian-Ordovician mass extinctions and glacial age, some 0.5 billion of years ago. The massive pulse of gamma ray turned the ozone layer into a brown nitrous dioxide layer.
s /earlier.html
2 978,1053475,00.html
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In turn that (A) allowed UV radiation from the sun to cook a lot of organisms. Yes, including those under water. _And_ (B) affected the climate so massively, that the Earth was turned into a cosmic ball of ice for an awfully long time. _And_ (C) must have caused one hell of a nitrous acid rain.
So I'd say you _really_ don't want to see one up close and personal.
Some reading on this topic:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/headate
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/dispatch/story/0,1
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99
(On the other hand, _if_ there's a God, you have to give the guy some credit. This is a much more clever way to devastate a planet than just a flood. Very efficient too.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Saeed's smarmy dig about this week's ISS EVA and the risk of a Hubble mission is wrongheaded. A Hubble repair mission is riskier than an ISS mission precisely because the crew can't shelter in the ISS if damage to the Shuttle precludes its safe reentry. EVA wasn't part of that decision.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
No, but it is easily visible in an 8" telescope.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
When supernova 1987A went off, the KAMIOKA detector in japan detected a burst (I think it was ~10) neutrinos. With new detectors online to detect different neutrino flavors, it will be interesting to see if there's any new physics to be found.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Still don't understand the bitterness regarding humans not being allowed to service Hubble. NASA already agreed to defer its Mars plan to send a robot to Hubble. Most of the world's population thinks human life is more valuable than a telescope. For all the bitching and whining the software engineering community did about astronauts dying on space shuttles, turning around and now saying humans should go out to Hubble shows absolutely no spine at all.
Does anyone in our industry still have an opinion or is it just about disagreeing with everyone else, no matter what their opinion is.
Yarr, my bad. Got a very polite email to that effect also. I looked at the images for a while but didn't see the smaller cloud in the larger image that is the only cloud in the smaller one.
Bah, details...
It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Then it's fun and games without depth perception.