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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.
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
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.
Even better is the fact that they don't point to different bright spots. It's just the before and after picture is a cropped version of the main and annotated images.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
That story regards NASA's tentative approval to design and send a robot to fix hubble, rather than simply sending over the shuttle.
Who said they could? Lol.
But seriously, I know the dynamic range of CCD's used telescopes can be at least 16 bits grayscale. To display them on a monitor/lcd you have to do some conversion. What basically look like very faint distinctions of shades of grey appear to be a detailed, crisp, starry picture of the sky to us (after conversion by the computer).
End result: They know that this white spec is ~100 times brighter than the white spec next to it, by looking at the raw intensity values observed from the camera.
p.s. Yes, I know that is a color image -- they probably took 3 grayscale images with red,green,and blue filters.
"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
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.
But even if you weren't sure, the "wavelength/frequency" of the light is INCREDIBLY different. A good eye can tell the difference between all the different sorts of supernova spectra in seconds.
Educated guess, my ass.
By the way, I'm one of Filippenko's supernova checkers. Hi everybody!
-Harrison
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Shh! don't ruin a good conspiracy.
"full_jpg.jpg" Who comes up with this shit?
Looking at the redshift of some common spectral line will give you an immediate answer. What I want to know is if the neutrino pulse was detected at one of our observatories like super kamiokande like supernova 1987a was. This one is much further away so I don't know if it was possible....
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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.
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.
Very true- planetary nebulae are some of the most beautiful objects in the universe. Hubble has taken a lot of great pictures of them. If you like the Cat's Eye, but occasionally want a different view, try these planetaries:
Hourglass Nebula
Spirograph Nebula
Eskimo Nebula
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
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
Bingo! Hubble takes grayscale pictures and these gets converted to false colour later. The reason? Hubble doesn't shoot with real colour because it would be useless for science. Instead, it uses some filters to pick up radiation from some certaion ionized atoms, hence HII (Hydrogen two) reference in the annoted picture. Now, looking at this picture, certain hue (like red) can represent HII. As a result, anywhere red occurs, you know there is lots of hydrogen. This helps with the amount of science can be obtained from a very pretty picture (after someone tweaks the colours to look pleasant for non-scientists).
Hubble Heritage Project is an awesome project and they should release more pictures. All of the HHP pictures are for real science but coloured for our pleasure as well. Hubble time is so rare and expensive, you can't waste it on snapshots.
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.
the neutrino pulse for 87a was seen hours before the optical observation.... http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/StarDeath/sn1987a.h tml
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Brightness isn't going to tell you whether or not the object is a supernova. In fact, the supernova is LESS bright than the star next to it. A good way to tell is to look at the CCD artifacts, like the vertical and horizontal lines. The longer they are, the brighter the object.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
It looks cool and all, but theres an even bigger looking one to the left.
Yeah, that's a star. About 11 million light years closer than the supernova. Just to give a hint of a relative brightness...
How exactly can they tell the difference?
Well, dunno, if you don't want to hear anything about doppler and red shift or wavelength, how about the fact that the bright star has been there for as long as we've been looking whereas the supernova just popped to brilliance a few months ago from a location that did not have anything even remotely as bright before?
Also the neutrinos get out of the Supernova core instantly, whereas the energy that is going to come out in photons has to fight its way up through the upper layers of the star.
Well, first of all, I meant "efficient" actually as in "effective". That pulse of gamma radiation did a thorough job of causing the biggest mass extinction in history.
But even if we talk efficiency as in physics: compare it to rising the ocean level that much. Even completely melting the polar caps won't do. We're talking either:
A. bringing a helluva lot of water from somewhere else. Which ought to cost a helluva lot of energy. Or
B. just creating more water. Which means even more energy. Think: E=m*c^2.
By comparison, detonating a star could require little more than giving it a nudge. It already has the fuel right there.
And perhaps more importantly: the flood just begs a lot of uncomfortable questions. The supernova just looks like an accident. Nothing suspicious about it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In this case, the supernova was observed almost as soon as it was visible. We can tell, because we have amateur astronomer's images from just hours before the supernova exploded, and nothing out of the ordinary was there.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Sure. Stars are mostly Hydrogen and Helium. A supernova is cascading fusion reaction, and they produce every naturally occuring element in the universe. The spectra reflect this.
I won't google a graph for you, but I'm sure it would only take a few seconds.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?