Massive Star Burps, Then Explodes

gollum123 writes with a link to the Berkley site about an impressive star explosion that took place some tens of millions of years ago. We first caught sight of it in 2004, when there was a bright outburst, ahead of a massive supernova. "All the observations suggest that the supernova's blast wave took only a few weeks to reach the shell of material ejected two years earlier, which did not have time to drift very far from the star. As the wave smashed into the ejecta, it heated the gas to millions of degrees, hot enough to emit copious X-rays. The Swift satellite saw the supernova continue to brighten in X-rays for 100 days, something that has never been seen before in a supernova. All supernovae previously observed in X-rays have started off bright and then quickly faded to invisibility."

Comments

Re:Eta Carinae Next?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean it could have gone any time? I mean, if it exploded 7000 years ago we'd still not have seen the explosion, and wouldn't for another several hundred years.

Re:How do we know it wasnt a fart?

[krbvroc1]

How is this a troll? Its supposed to be funny. All these Astronomers describe their 'work product' with Antrhopomorphic terms, add 'pretty colors' to their space images, etc. Apparently you guys have no sense of humor either!

Re:Eta Carinae Next?

[operagost]

You mean it could have gone at any time...

Huh?

[SirKron]

about an impressive star explosion that took place some tens of millions of years ago

But my priest told me God made the universe 10,000 years ago. How can that be? Maybe it exploded in the universe we had previous to ours, you know, the one with the dinosaurs.

Re:Huh?

[Kazrath]

What??? Before you try to critisize a religion or hell even a topic you should at least have some understanding of it.

Re:Things that happened in 2006 happened in 2006

[Akaihiryuu]

Because it *did* happen that long ago. It just took the light from the supernova that long to reach us, so that we could see it.

Re:Things that happened in 2006 happened in 2006

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Given that all inertial frames are equally good, why not just pick the one that's popular with readers of the article? Seems fair to me, after all you need some coordinate system if you're going to communicate physics. In fact, I'm a bit confused by what you mean by "the one that actually makes a tiny bit of sense". The only one I can think of is an inertial frame of the supernova itself. In that frame, here and now is also tens of millions of years later than when the supernova happened. But maybe you have another one in mind.