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Brightest Supernova Discovered
Maggie McKee writes "Astronomers have spotted the brightest supernova ever seen — it is intrinsically two to three times brighter than any previously recorded. It has many characteristics of a type Ia explosion, but has hydrogen in its spectrum, unlike other type Ia's. That suggests that this supernova resulted from the collision of two stars — most likely a white dwarf and a red giant — rather than from an exploding white dwarf. If so, it might affect the interpretation of previous cosmological studies that depend on type Ia 'standard candle' observations, like dark energy. But other astronomers say merger-triggered explosions are probably rare and therefore won't throw a wrench in the works."
If you are really interested in the topic I recommend
Fraser, Craig G.
Title The cosmos : a historical perspective
Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006.
I learned a lot from it about novas.
Maybe this one will draw in a bigger crowd than Lukas Rossi.
...)
(I kid, I kid! He's an upstanding Canadian guy
Do not look into the supernova with your remaining eye!
(theres a lot of bright shiney things around at the moment, I'm surprised anyone can see anything at all)
liqbase
If, hypothetically, you found yourself to have evolved first or to exist in an otherwise empty galaxy - then you might look for an easy way to get the attention of any civilizations in any other galaxies. If you could move a star (details, details) then this would be a good way to get yourself noticed.
Of course, you would want to do it several times over a short period, and you would want it to coincide with a radio transmission that actually contained some data. So the way it works is, a hundred million years from now another civilization sees the stars go up, so they point their radio telescope at the galaxy, and they hear your message.
I realize this is all just a fantasy, but it's a cool one.
someone write it up
If it was so bright, how come nobody ever saw it before?
FTA, it looks like the supernova is brighter than the host galaxy's core. Not a bad way to go out, if you're a star.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Yes, but does it run linux?
Vehicle Stars used car search is my current project
Can't we call it a hypernova? And if we find anything brighter, we can call that an ultranova.
You know, If I were to look for intelligent life, I would think of finding rare and exciting things in the sky, such as this, and figure out "If I had the capability, how close would I get to the occurance to view it safely?" and look there.
Seriously, we have traffic jams when people rubberneck to see some guy with a flat tire on the side of the road. An intergalactic explosion would certainly draw some attention from the local neighbors, no?
And another invocation of stellar merging to explain the anomaly.
People, look at what's happening. Read the space news as a critical thinker. There isn't a week that goes by where the concept of stellar evolution isn't violated by some observation. Stellar evolution is an *assumption* that cannot possibly be proven or disproven because we won't be around long enough to see a star go through all of the steps of the process. It is completely based upon the idea that stars are nothing more than thermonuclear reactions. But our observations of the Sun do not support this concept:
1. The solar wind continues to accelerate past all of the planets as if those charged particles are within a weak electric field centered at the Sun.
2. The generation of neutrinos coming from the Sun correlates with the number of sunspots on the Sun's surface. We know that the sunspot cycle is a *magnetic* process on the *surface* of the Sun and the fusion model for the Sun proposes that the neutrinos should be generated within the deep core of the Sun. Those two steps of the process are supposedly separated by hundreds of thousands of years according to the solar fusion model. How is it possible that they are linked?
3. The surface of the Sun is around 6,000 K and the Sun's corona is around 2 million K. How is it possible that the energy generated at the core of the fusion-model Sun makes it to the corona without heating up the Sun's surface? Astrophysicists have proposed a concept called magnetic reconnections, but magnetic reconnections is completely pseudoscience. The concept of a magnetic field reconnecting and generating energy in the process is akin to a gravitational field reconnecting and generating energy. Neither can happen because field lines *never* reconnect any more than lines of latitude or longitude reconnect. Magnetic field lines are a smooth continuum. Furthermore, the points at which it is alleged that reconnection is happening -- the saddle points at the front of the "bow shock" as astrophysicists like to say -- is where the field strength is *zero*. And wherever the field strength is zero, the energy stored there at that point is also *zero*. No energy release can occur from any location at which no energy is stored. The fact that astrophysicists have been getting away with making these absurd statements regarding magnetic reconnections for decades now demonstrates the extent to which their field has run afowl of science. Any electrical engineer that hears about the details of magnetic reconnections should not stand for it, and they deserve some of the blame for not speaking louder about this. Millions of dollars are being poured into this concept right now.
Let me tell you a little story about astrophysics. Hannes Alfven, who is considered the father of plasma physics, and who received a nobel prize for this work, created the entire field of magnetohydrodynamics, which serves as the modern day basis for electricity and magnetism within astrophysics. Alfven proposed early in his career that electric currents do *not* flow through plasmas and that plasmas can be assumed to have "frozen in place" magnetic fields within them. Magnetohydrodynamics treats plasmas as fluids and assumes that they have little resistivity, so they are basically perfect conductors. In his acceptance speech for the nobel prize, he made a point of explaining that these earlier assumptions were certainly wrong, and although they may make things easier for astrophysics students, they will yield incorrect results in the real world. Modern day plasma physics are demonstrating all sorts of very unusual phenomenon, some of which can't even be said to follow Maxwell's Equations. It is now clear that the assumptions that the astrophysicists borrowed many years ago and refuse to revise in light of new findings are *wrong*. Alfven was completely ignored and the picture hasn't changed at all since then. Astrophysics students will tell you outright that electricity exists in space, but that it doesn't r
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
OK, so this is calling into question one of the "standard candles" of astronomy and cosmology. But I'm curious exactly how? There's a fairly simple formula that relates absolute magnitude, relative magnitude, and distance. If you know any two, you can calculate the third. The whole concept of standard candles is that there are some events for which we know the absolute magnitude. This article is saying this is one of the standard candle events, but much brighter than ever before. The big question for me is, how do they know it's not just closer than ever before? My understanding is that the standard candle equations are the only way to determine distance at these ranges.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
http://www.classicnovas.net/features/snova/index.h tm
Inversing the colors provides a more lifelike image. For the lazy.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Yeee-haaawr!!!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/09/24/