Slashdot Mirror
Supernova Casts Doubt on "Standard Candle"
Krishna Dagli writes, "A supernova more than twice as bright as others of its type has been observed, suggesting it arose from a star that managed to grow more massive than theoretically thought possible. The observation suggests that Type 1a supernovae may not be 'standard candles' — all having the same intrinsic luminosity — as previously thought. This could affect their use as probes of dark energy, the mysterious force causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate."
"twice as bright as others of its type"
/. reader then. ;)
Obviously not a
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Could this be an effect of gravity of surrounding galaxies lensing the light from a 'normal' large star in our direction and just appearing brighter?
Ryan Fenton
(note: I'm Canadian) ;-)
Why is the telescope called "Canada-France-Hawaii" instead of "Canada-France-USA" telescope?
Or did Hawaii separate from the US recently?
Thomas Dz.
Now all we need is a Suprnova twice as bright.
Models are just that, models. Change them when the universe shoves reality down your throat. Far too many people think that math defines the universe instead of describing it.
So why do I think this is a 'good thing'? As the article speculates, it is likely that this supernova was different because of some rotational process or perhaps colliding stars, or some other exotic combination. This is exactly the sort of process that can be used as a test of supernova models to see how well they do. Over all I find this a very exciting observation and hopefully it produces more new science!
The observation suggests supernovae of this type are not "standard candles" as previously thought, which could affect their use as probes of dark energy - the mysterious force causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
If true, this wouldn't just affect their use as probes of dark energy. These standard candles are used to tell how far away things are and how fast they are moving. The age of the universe could be in doubt.
But I have a hunch this particular supernova will turn out to be an anomaly. Not that I'm a astrophysicist or anything.
This is astronomy. Astronomers are generally happy getting thing to an order of magnitude. I am not sure one supernova that is twice as bright is going to change things that much.
Disclaimers: IRAAA (I really am an astronomer), but I know nothing about using SN as standard candles (other than the fact that they are used...). No, I did not RTFA.
http://www.proton21.com.ua/
They simulated a micro super nova here
Producing micro fussion/fission and creation of new materials.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I study supernovae for a living.
i g_tab/nature05103_F1.html
The Nature paper in which this work is published has a figure showing all the measurements of this supernova's brightness; you can see it on Nature's web site at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7109/f
There are four measurements near time of maximum light, in the red (r) and near-infrared (i) passbands. There are many more measurements starting about 15 days after maximum light in the rest frame, including some in a blue-green (g) passband. Here's what the researchers did to find the maximum brightness of this supernova, so that they could compare it to others:
a) fit models based on the light curves of other supernovae to the r and i measurements,
and the late-time g measurements
b) choose a different passband -- the greenish V passband of the Johnson-Cousins system,
which is closest to their own g passband (the one with no data at max light)
c) use their models to estimate what the light curve in the V filter would have been
This can be a tricky business. Their major conclusion, that this supernova was more luminous than typical ones, is probably correct, but their claim that they can measure the peak magnitude in the V-band to an uncertainty of 6 percent seems a bit bold.
As the press release states, if atypical SNe are very rare, then this probably doesn't have any major impact on the use of Type Ia SNe in cosmology.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
It's a pretty familier story, and essential for the advancement of science.
The standard candle was a theory, one that worked well, and now it's in doubt, indicating either that its wrong, or it's incomplete. I'd vote for the latter personally.
That's usually a safe bet...
That's how things move forward.
I shortcut this process. I proved one of my hypothesis wrong even though it had withstood initial tests which indicated correctness. It probably saved a lot of time, but lost me a conference trip, dammit.
What lame Bitorrent jokes? there arent any. i put it to you that you saw the word "supernova" but couldnt think of a pun, so instead you obliquely referenced the fact that you noticed that the word "supernova" is loosely related to bittorrent, just so that the one moment in your life you came close to having something witty to say wasnt lost to posterity.
Dark energy? the mysterious force? Oh, I get it, we found the death star!
That was funny right? *nudge**nudge*
I'm not trying to make people mad; I'm trying to make people think!
Can we stop talking about Supernova now? Besides, I really don't think this band has the ability to think about or comment on things such as "standard candle"... oh wait... wrong site... sorry
Meh.
1) Never trust anything you read in New Scientist.
2) Consider the following, discovered on Google:
My emphasis added.
... about has as smart as the average American.... almost too smart for the Rock industry!
Since when do these guys know anything about astrophysics?
Take, for instance, cosmology: the supernova-based estimates of the expansion history of the universe agree with the entirely independent cosmic background radiation-based estimates. Unless you want to chalk that agreement up to an amazing coincidence, supernova standard candles can't be too far off from the present calibration curve. That being said, it is a tricky business, and there is certainly room for uncertainty; it's just not likely to be "cast everything we know about distances and ages in the universe into doubt" uncertainty.
Supernova don't get most of their energy from the sun itself. It gets the energy from the entire circuit it is a part of. Thus, this star could in fact have been very small, but been in a very large circuit and been this bright.0 11elec-nova.htm4 12supernova.htm9 30tychostar.htm
Check these out:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/051
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/arch05/050
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
That's the Platonist viewpoint, that mathematicians are discovering mathematical truths that already exist, rather than constructing them out of a formal system. A mathematical reality exists independently of us, and of anything. We, as imperfect beings can only get close to it, to approximate it {perhaps with these things called models}. This view was quite popular among mathematicians until the 20th century turn on objectivity. Gödel is an example of a Platonist.
done
So what you are saying is....eh....the thing with the........when the thing with the other thing goes...to.....because the wotsit is like the..eh....so, do they run Linux in their lab?
allllright Tom Cruise, time to get off your soapbox!
Speculation has led many to believe that Supernova is either Booster Gold or Ambush Bug. Others speculate him to be a resurrected Superboy, but there is no overriding evidence to support any of these theories other than Supernova possibly being male, having an "attitude" and knowing the location of Batman's Batcave.
Question for you: These Type 1a Supernova are used as one step on the distance ladder, correct? So if we no longer believe they all have the same brightness, that means the distance we have on record for many objects is now wrong?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Aside even from the age of the universe, at stake would be whether the universe is in fact expanding at the widely understood rate, or perhaps whether the universe is expanding at all. IOW at stake again is the question of ultimate fate.
It seems in TFA that astronomers do have some data to reevaluate, toss, and that these fundamental calculations could be in flux. This is exciting, we might not be expanding to oblivion, instead we might be contracting to oblivion like we thought we were before! Knowledgeable comments here seem to think otherwise, that inconsistency related to what should be consistent Chandrasekhar mass in supernovae won't ultimately affect universal expansion calculations. My amateur reading of expert opinion: this does matter, at least theoretically in the special case, and probably for the more general cosmological cases, too. We'll see.
On the related ultimate fate question, I've often wondered why popular astronomers seem to think either (1) it's all going to contract indefinitely -- so we'll perish in an ultimate crunch, or (2) it's all going to expand indefinitely -- so we'll perish in an ultimate fade. Either way we're meaningless in the end, and there is entirely nothing we can do about it.
Well gee, pardon my optimism, but couldn't anyone entertain the possibility of flux in the amount of matter and energy in the observable universe? Couldn't we suppose that black holes leaking into imaginary time, or parallel matter in higher dimensions, or some other mechanism might possibly exist by which we are ... I dunno, not ultimately meaningless? Is it not possible to suppose the universe might expand, slow down, contract, slow down, expand again -- but never singularly or infinitely? Must our most eminent scientists pretend they know certainly what truly they only predict theoretically based on their best current knowledge?
The scientists instead seem to rather gleefully predict our penultimate doom of one sort or the other. They seem so sure of themselves on the television and in major lectures, they state predictions as if they are knowledge and not subject to change. This doesn't jive at all with the scientific method nor with critical thought, while certainty even if imagined might serve some personal, human emotional needs just fine.
I wonder whether their attitude hurts the public's acceptance of critical thinking as a modus operandi. Could it be that scientists' certain-doom-speak has precipitated less acceptance of the scientific method, of scientists, and of scientific observation and theory? Could it be that the public, so often maligned on /. and in scientific circles, sees through the chicanery used to win grants and sell books and whatnot? Could it be that scientists end up looking just like religious nuts who believe something rather than observing and analysing and hypothesizing? Could it be that given a choice between one nut who says we're definitely doomed and another who says we're definitely in control of our fate, the public supposes "might as well go with the hopeful one?"
I do think this discovery is illuminating with respect to the limits of our knowledge, not that we should need further evidence of such. If I may make this prediction, based on our long history of not fully knowing what we thought we knew: I find it likely that some discovery in the near future will fundamentally change our understanding of our universe. I would even predict we will never know everything. I predict in other words that again in the longer future, then again in the distant future and again unpredictably forever after, we will happen upon discoveries which fundamentally alter our understandings.
Given that, I suggest scientists would be better understood and more respected if we stopped pretending we know what we merely predict, assume, or suppose. The public might not collectively make a great mathematician or considerate strategist, but they're sometimes quite good at smelling a rat. Given only rats to choose from, they'll take whichever makes the most entertaining pet. BG
Type Ia supernovae are indeed one of the last rungs on the distance ladder; they can be used to estimate distances to very distant galaxies.
No, that's an overstatement. Type Ia supernovae are one of several different indicators used to estimate distances to very distant galaxies -- not the only one. _If_ we suddenly thought that the luminosity of _all_ Type Ia supernovae was significantly higher, _then_ we would have to re-examine the agreement between distances derived from Type Ia supernovae and other methods. The net effect might be a slight shift in the value of the Hubble constant, which is used to estimate distances to really, really distant objects.
However, if only 1 in 100 or fewer Type Ia supernovae are more luminous than expected, it won't make any significant difference in studies which use lots of supernovae.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
well now I guess we have one more problem to worry about: supernova obeisity. Let's strap Richard Simmons and that tae bo guy to a rocket and send them on over to get it back down to normal, exceptable size.
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
It's not like this is Rocket science or brain surgery.
Why does the article not mention when the supernova was observed (date or time) nor where in the night sky it was observed? I would think that'd be something the author would expect people would want to know, no?
Support the FairTax
If the universe does not work on principles of logic (and hence mathematics), then fairies and pink unicorns do roam the plains of Nebraska, while miracles occur via Mother Theresa, and Jesus walks on water. I mean what business are scientists in if they don't think that the universe follows some order? To say it follows this or that order some of the time is just crazy right? If things can happen in the universe without any cause or reason, then what is the point of science? What exactly are we investigating? Alice would have more hope in wonderland based on a world irrational.
;-)
The above statement being made, I do know that at the quantum level it appears that particles are popping into and going out of existence all the time, and that it may be possible that "all of this", everything we know of is just TEMPORARY. It could be possible that if the entire universe is simply a completely random event then nothing matters anyway. The only flip side to these types of arguments is the argument of infinite complexity, which could only manifest itself in a world of infinite energy and infinite time. But if the universe is closed and bounded then like a finite state machine, it must run its course. These principles are known, well defined, and are as the saying goes "not subject to negotiation".
I've often wondered whether we already know, down deep, instinctively that the universe must ultimately relinquish all information to be "reset" in the end. This is because there probably isn't infinite energy to store all the bits of information that could possibly be encoded. Eventually, either you run out of storage for information, or you run out of information to store which is the result being the same...a dead end. These thoughts occur to me because of the religious idea of the "afterlife". Taking a completely scientific view of things, if we are machines and all machines are made of the stuff (that is the universe itself), then when machines are disassembled they get reassembled at some point in the future into some other thing. So when we are born, we begin to encode all the information that occurs throughout our lifetime. When we die, that information is dumped. It must be, because simply if we lived forever we would need an infinite amount of storage. So taking a maximal extrapolation from that I find that we in fact may have lived before, and we may in fact live again (in some other person, or form), its just that the universe forces us to forget...because that is just we way it is, that is how the universe works. Ultimately the universe itself must "reset" because there is no "infinitely extended sequence of digits" that will "be spat out" buy the Turing machine that will be different from anything that came before.
Of course all this is mere speculation at this point because we don't have sufficient data to make final statements here. But one thing is guaranteed, within the resolution of your own computers monitor, there are only a finite number of images that can be seen. If God exists, and can be seen, then his/her/its image must be representable on your computers monitor within the resolution. And if you could see a God, then you could ultimately write out the code necessary to produce "Gods image".
Enough already, I need to get back to work.
Enjoy.
> "A supernova more than twice as bright as others of its type
> has been observed, suggesting it arose from a star that
> managed to grow more massive than theoretically thought possible
Assuming the theory is correct...Contact! You heard it here first!
Sci-fi is replete with civilizations that are messing around with black holes and supergiant stars and crap.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I've never heard of Standard Candle, but I really don't know what Supernova would have against them.
Perhaps they're still miffed that Tommy Lee et al borrowed their name for a reality show recently...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife