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Echoes from Ancient Supernovae Found?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bounce-that-off-me-again dept.

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are claiming that they may have found echoes left over from ancient supernovae. From the article: "Just as a sound echo can occur when sound waves bounce off a distant surface and reflect back toward the listener, a light echo can be seen when light waves traveling through space are reflected back toward the viewer. The light echoes were discovered by comparing images of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) taken years apart. By precisely subtracting the common elements in each image and analyzing what variable objects remain, the team looked for evidence of dark matter that might distort the light of stars in a transitory way, as part of a second-generation sky survey called SuperMACHO. SuperMACHO builds on the discoveries of the MACHO project, which started at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1989."

6 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Nothing new by FhnuZoag · · Score: 4, Informative

    The summary is a bit misleading. Light echoes are by no means a recent discovery. APOD viewers like me have seen them since at least 1997.

    http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap971023.html

    1. Re:Nothing new by doubletruncation · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is actually a pretty exciting result that's different from the case of SN 1987A in that they're seeing light from ancient SN which were never observed originally. It's the idea of discovering ancient supernovae by light echoes that's new, not just seeing a light echo from a supernova. You can see their paper at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0510738.

  2. Re:Bonus Points! by Bros · · Score: 1, Informative

    "Super Novae" is the plural of "Super Nova".

  3. Re:"SuperMACHO" by FhnuZoag · · Score: 4, Informative

    But SuperMACHO is an awesome project name! You just need to know a bit of the background here.

    There are two main theories for Dark Matter (which, lest we forget, stands for missing mass that we can't seem to detect):

    1. WIMPs - Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Stuff like neutrinos that interact only though gravity/weak nuclear. They are dark because they are so tiny and ghostly.
    2. MACHOs - MAssive Compact Halo Objects. Stuff like black holes, neutrons stars. Things so big and massive that they bend light around them and make themselves invisible, and of course emit no light themselves.

    Isn't it so neat that we have two natural acronyms here that stand in juxaposition to each other? Naturally, we call a project to find MACHOs, Project MACHO, and a project to supersede that Project SuperMACHO.

    See... Not horrible and fake at all.

  4. Re:Bonus Points! by giorgiofr · · Score: 4, Informative

    People should just stop trying to use latin plurals. First, they usually get them wrong (virii with two i's etc); second, once a foreign word becomes part of your language, you stop using its native plural, genitive if any, various cases etc.
    You don't go around saying you see a supernovam or the light of a supernovae, so why do you insist in saying there are two supernova (or novae if you get it wrong)? Either use always the same form of the word, or use English plural formation rules.

    --
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  5. Slightly misspoken by localroger · · Score: 3, Informative

    What I'm sure the author meant to say is that the light from the original supernova explosion would have arrived here 600 years ago.

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