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Powerful Supernova May Be Related To Death Spasms of First Stars
necro81 writes "The New York Times is reporting on a discovery from a team of UC Berkley researchers, who may have discovered the brightest stellar explosion ever observed. Observations of the cataclysmic explosion of a 100- to 200-solar-mass star began last September, based on data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The researchers believe that the explosion is similar to the death spasms of the first stars in the universe. The super-massive star's collapse is believed to have been so energetic as to create unstable electron-positron pairs that tore the star apart before it could collapse into a black hole — seeding the universe with heavier elements."
Is there a time-lapse video of this somewhere? The article I read only had an artist's rendering. Or when they say "observed" are they just talking about measurements?
Great summary. Lots of informative links, accurate and intriguing summary of the article(s). No gratuitous inflammatory question.
Someone pinch me, I think I'm dreaming.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
They talk at the end about a star 7500 LY away that might "go supernova soon." It should probably be pointed out that it could have already gone supernova 6000 years ago and we'd not know about it.
I guess they should say "might see if it went supernova soon."
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Dave Pooley, at the University of California at Berkeley, said if Eta Carinae were to explode "it would be so bright that you would see it during the day, and you could even read a book by its light at night". Eta Carinae's death could be "the most spectacular star show in history." Is it just me, or does that sound a little bit too close...President Zarlak of the Kharyak Confederation:
For much of the last millenium, Ksharyak's defense has relied on the Cold War doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases, those strategies still apply, but new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against Solar Systems, means nothing, against shadowy, terrorist networks with no home planet or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorists' allies. Thus we have started a war plan that we call "Shock and Awe". We believe it is working. We believe that no group will again threaten the sovereignty of the Kharyak Confederation after this display. Even the bastard stepchildren of the universe are aware of our power now.
From the words of a flea bag in the far reaches of the universe:
"Of all exploding stars ever observed, this was the king," said Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley astronomer and leader of the ground-based observations at the University of California's Lick Observatory in California and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. "We were astonished to see how bright it got, and how long it lasted."
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
So you're saying it's a bad thing to revise theories based on new information or observations? There is a reason they are called "theories".
Big badaboom!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It's the revisions that make it science.
Some scientists--and physicists can be especially guilty of this in my experience--place too much faith in their own knowledge and accept the current findings of science as absulute fact. They forget that science is fluid, always changing as new information enters the equation and each answer spawns new questions. Call it arrogance if you want; I think it's something less than that.
In any case, what's the alternative? "God did it"? That may very well be true, but it doesn't answer the question of "how did it happen?"...which is what science seeks to explain.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Here's the NASA article about it.
u-bend
I think this comes close to the problems with scientific debate and creation; one places a definition on "theory" that is far too close to "universal law" (which doesn't particularly exist) and the other defines it far too closely to "hypothesis."
Both, I have found, tend to be far too dogmatic in their beliefs on the debate (or, dare I say it, faith).
What, they had supercomputers back in the 1930s? Neutrons were only first discovered in 1932. The theoretical existence of neutron stars wasn't conceived until 1933. The discovery of pulsars didn't happen until the later 60s.
Arrogance would be to say that what they know now is the ultimate truths. Scientific theories are always being re-thought and re-worked. Nobody claims to have all the answers. Sorry, quacks do, but real scientists don't.
Good science provides answers to some fundamental question. In turn those answers will spawn many more new questions. The never-ending quest for knowledge.
I just wonder who the hell modded the parent up? Someone from Kansas, probably.
Isn't this what academic research is (in theory) all about? The search for better understanding, enabling us to revise our theories of how the universe (or some small subset of it) works?
Find the simplest theory that fits all the observations. New data may mean you need a new theory, or that you need to revise your current theory. I don't understand the problem you have, unless it's just with the arrogance of some theorists who claim to have found the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. I say, let them be arrogant -- when they are disproved, they'll fall harder for it.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It's Berkeley, not Berkley.
"Now, THAT was an earth-shattering Ka-Boom!" - Marvin the Martian
Why shouldn't we believe "the astrophysicists"? Did they lie to you? Gore your ox? Steal your candy? Pee in your breakfast cereal?
After 70 years of computer simulations and observations they failed to predict this new kind of supernova.
Yeah, so? There are infinitely many things that are true which scientists have yet to predict. Why are you under the impression that scientists are supposed to know everything? Even if they did know all the physics involved, you can still only make finitely many predictions in finite time.
Its interesting to read speculations about degenerate lepton gases, but arent they just hand-waving again?
"Again"? When were they "hand-waving" before? About what?
Just goes to show you the arrogance of physicists- they claim answers and grandiose Standard Theories, but are frequently revising them because they mis things like accelerating expansion and 150SM supernova.
That's a feature, not a bug. It's how science works! Physicists claim answers because they have answers. That doesn't mean they have ALL the answers, or they're always right. This is no different in astrophysics than in any other field of physics, or any other science, or in any other field of study, period. People know some things, they can predict some things, and sometimes they miss something or get something wrong. That doesn't mean that nobody knows anything or that experts have nothing useful to say.
(By the way, accelerating expansion was in Einstein's theory from the start, but he took it out because there wasn't any evidence for it at the time.)
I seriously don't understand your point of view, unless (as is likely) it's just flamebait. Every time something new is discovered, do you seriously run around disparaging whole fields of science just because the new thing wasn't predicted ahead of time? Or do you just have some bug up your nose about astrophysicists? It's not like they were even wrong about normal supernovae, they just didn't predict this new kind.
"32 score decades oughta be enough for anybody" -- Genesis 4:11
Actually, my understanding was that astronomers are suggesting that this may be the first observed case of a type of supernova called pair-instability. The actual prediction of pair-instability supernovae was made decades ago - it's more that observations are catching up with predictions.
So, you seem to have gotten this exactly backwards.
As a bit of reading should also make clear, the reason that observations of this type of supernova are rare is that the conditions that favored the formation of stars capable of exploding this way have become rare as the universe has aged. They are expected to be far more common in the early universe, and it's hoped that the next generation of space telescope will be capable of viewing them (as it will see further, and thus earlier, into the universe).
______ This mind intentionally left blank.
Now that's an Extinction Level Event.
"Ooh! Aaah!" dead
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
From the article:
The discovery was made by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovasIt was a precursor bomb! Looks like someone's copying the Shofixti's tactics.
If you bothered to read the article, you'd see that the probable cause of the supernova's extreme gamma production actually was predicted some decades ago. It's simply that no-one expected to see a supernova from a star that big, so people mostly forgot about the calculation. Of course, no-one is certain that pair instability is the actual mechanism, it being difficult to perform repeatable tests on a very remote explosion...
In addition, it seems odd that you're expecting people to predict essentially random events occurring in the deep past and (equivalently) hundreds of millions of light-years away. That seems like the domain of soothsayers, not responsible scientists.
(Finally, of course, science also has to progress by the accumulation of evidence, and novel phenomena are part of this. This is especially true in astrophysics, where you can't actually perform experiments directly - you have to do the equivalent of stamp collecting instead.)
Does anybody know any resource that lists how most likely all the elements originated from stable baryons and electrons, including chains like element1->element2+element3 (fusion) -> element4 (fission) -> element5,element6 with estimates of conditions necessary for each transition to happen?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
How is trying to explain something based on the best current evidence arrogance? Are you saying people shouldn't ever believe anything or they should just ignore new info? Sorry but science is a continual learning process and unlike religion is constantly adjusting to new information and better explanations.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
As an astrophysicist I feel I should comment. First of all, 70 years of computer simulations later.... we are just beginning to be able to model a supernova with high enough resolution that we can "kind of" fit the observations without contrived scaling factors. This is also only being done in two dimensions and for the first few microseconds of a supernova. Models that hardly include all the physics involved are too much for the modern computational machine. Everytime we run a new model that includes more physics, they fit the data better and better. It is this way we discover what physics matters in the actual explosion. Since we cannot COMPLETELY model anything in real life on a computer all simulations are hand-wavy. Second, developing theories is very important. You use all of the available data and create a theory that can be tested and describes the current state of what you are studying. The real test of a theory is if it stands up to scrutiny. IF the "standard model" was so vague that no meaningful tests could be performed to prove the theory incorrect then it is a bad theory. Scientists prove things wrong, that is out job. We find situations where the current models do not describe the observations. That is scientific progress. We adjust our theories and learn about new physics. If gravity wasnt tested we would still be using Newtonian Gravity rather than General Relativity, which is still being worked on today (Gravity Probe B). Lastly, Astronomers have never observed a 150-200 Msolar supernova before. This is the first time we are able to look at what might have happened when the first stars formed. If we had seen a whole lot of these and had a perfect unified model then we wouldnt have to do science or discover things anymore. This is an exciting time as we have the most advanced instruments built by humans peering into the early universe discivering where we came from. I am always excited about new results, whether they be proven wrong or not, because we are always one step closer to understanding the world in which we live.
This is a great comment that nicely summarizes the scientific method. I may be a bit off-topic, but I wish I could find more comments like this in the anthropogenic global warming debates here on /.
After 70 years of computer simulations and observations they failed to predict this new kind of supernova.
You're right. Mainstream astrophysics is just a bunch of hooey. These guys will eventually be forced to confront the one true theory: the electric universe. After all, in the electric universe theory, supernovas are easily explained as...um...well...anyway, it's just a simple electricity-effect-thingy.
I mean, it's been like a few magnitudes smaller. Gimme about 500 sun masses and I create you something spectacular too!
Compared to this, the Tsar was the equivalent of an ant farting.
Then again, I'm glad it was. Just imagine...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The GP just fell a victim of the X-Files series, in which Scully would always say something like: "This is science, you do not questions science, god damn it!" (well, ok, I added the 'god damn it' part, but the rest is exactly what the show was about - the rigid and unquestionable science constantly standing in a way of a religios like believe that the Truth is out there.)
You can't handle the truth.
With massive stars (though not as massive as TFA discusses) the final collapse causes a shockwave that finally ignites a layer deep in the star which burns so hot and explosively that it blows the outside layers of the star off, giving us the nebula.
The leftover, however, continues with its collapse, as there's no long enough star left to run much fusion - especially of the heavier "ash" at the core, which may even be elements up to iron, which takes more energy to fuse than the fusion gives out in return, and thus is a "heat sink".
My question, based on this (admittedly faulty) memory, is two-fold:
To "Powerful Supernova May Be Related To Death", which I thought was a bit weird.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Should about 120 solar masses be maximal limit for a star size, because that is approximately the Eddington limit.
in the space.com article on this they mention that our own MilkyWay has a star about to go SuperMasive Nova at any time called Eta Carinae. Eta Carinae is about 7000 light years away so they say we are safe, but the Nova from last September eventually became brighter than it's own galaxy. So what i )BÇm wondering is even if we are safe from debris from this soon-to-be nova, what about an EMP from it?
Do we know that 200 solar mass stars can exist within the Eddington limit? To summarize, higher mass will increase the energy output of the star's fusion reactions, and there's a point where this can more than counter the force of gravity. How would a star exceed this? Are collisions or mass accretion from another object likely?
Slashdot, 240 million years behind the times.
(I should probably post this anonymously
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+5, Troll
We'll likely never know how many populated worlds were destroyed from the gamma ray burst. But all life "nearby" would have been instantly killed.
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I'm a Christian who believes in evolution. I'm actually working on a series of articles on Christianity's relationship with science and my *opinion* on what the Church is doing wrong right now that is hurting our message.
One of the key points I'm hoping to raise is the fact that Christians largely do not understand the principles of science and the meanings of many of the words it uses. In our collective ignorance, the Church is often railing against things that don't mean anything close to what we think it means.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
When I was in church as a child and was taught about stories from the Bible which seemed physically impossible, I would ask HOW god did it. The answer was always: magic.
I hope that answers your scientific questions so that you can quit wasting my tax dollars on pointless research and get back to praising jesus.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Ha. I just copied that off the bottom of the page, right below your comment.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
"Begs the question" actually means "assumes".
For example, the question, "Will we survive the blast from Eta Carinae's supernova event?" begs the question that Eta Carinae has had a supernova event. We don't actually know whether or not Eta Carinae has exploded, but the question here assumes that it has and moves on. Begging the question is considered a logical fallacy, because it assumes something without proving it, and then bases further reasoning on that unproven assumption.
You're thinking of "raising the question", as in, "the possibility of Eta Carinae exploding raises the question of whether or not we would survive the blast".
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Robert Sawyer wrote a book based on the premise that Carinæ is about to light up and toast us.
George Lucas has taken a turn for the worst, exclaiming "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
Which Church?
Recent comments from the Vatican shows that the Chatholics are finaly getting a clue.
many of the more reasonable christians thoughout the world seem more concerned with the ethical implications of the emerging biotechnology and genetics fields that with bible bashing creationism.
I ussualy try to avoid disparaging Americans, but they do seem to hold most of the copyrights for the whackier side of theology at the moment
You shall know him by his Sig
I'm so tired of people trying to outshout each other on most forums. When do the know-it-all's find time to learn anything new, anyway? Thanks for the warning, but all they can do is call me bad names (so what?) and toss F-bombs in garbled 1337. Plus, if you'd like more civility in the world, what better place to start than at home? I know this will gag the cynics, but "Do As Ye Would Be Done By" is powerful stuff if a critical mass is reached, I would suppose. Got my tinfoil dunce-cap in the event a Vibe/Shitstorm hits...
I further promise not to wander so far OT in future.
Ah! A TROLL