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Eta Carinae, Soon To Be a Local Supernova
da4 writes "Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy has a great article about Eta Car, a star approx 7,500 light years away from us that's ready to supernova sometime Real Soon Now." Larger versions of the Hubble-Chandra image of Eta Car are available at the Chandra site. Of course when astronomers say it's "about to explode," they really mean it probably exploded 6,500 to 7,500 years ago and we're awaiting the news.
If we never get the news, will it actually have exploded, or not?
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
We could be waiting to see this supernova theoretically about as long as the pyramids have been standing over the sands of Egypt.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Apparently da4 discovered some new non-relative timescale that's consistent throughout the universe without respect to position or velocity. That seems much more noteworthy than this supernova thing.
A few nights of having a star in the night sky that is brighter than the moon, perhaps?
And lets not forget all the religious fanatics taking it as a sign, and panicking, and causing social unrest or upheaval around the globe.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
So, in a local causal sense, it hasn't happened yet. The distance just means that if we thought to have any influence on it before it happens here, we'd have to have done something thousands of years ago or longer to exert a causal influence.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
There's something that doesn't quite follow with this article. The article states that we are only in danger when the bipolar configuration faces us. However, when the bipolar morphology faces us, it will look just like a sphere. The other lobe will be obstructed by the one closest to us. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but how often do we see spherical objects in space as being identified as a bipolar configuration pointing at us?
Couldn't a person make a pretty convincing argument that the bipolar configuration is in fact the primary configuration of all such objects, and that anything that looks like a sphere to us is in fact just the bipolar configuration pointing at us?
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
So, you think that theories that are widely accepted by the experts in the field are less objective than those theories that are accepted by their creators alone? An interesting definition, I wonder what would you call a "subjective" theory...
Theories are not evaluated on the basis of their merit alone, but rather how well their creators can withstand a relentless series of withering attacks.
Psst, I have some bad news for you. The "merit" of a theory could be very well *defined* as how it can whitstand a relentless series of withering attacks. If it cannot do that, it has no merit. Any scientist pretty much expects to have every word he publishes put in doubt, tested, and re-tested. Every number he writes will be measured again and again by people all over the world who will refuse to accept his word for it.
In fact, the worst that can happen to a scientist is publishing a work about which no one expresses any doubt, because this would mean it's considered irrelevant. A relentless series of whithering attacks is what keeps any *true* scientist alive. Only crooks fear being put to test.
This is a trend that I believe was started back in the day of Carl Sagan
Ah, no, it's much older than that! This trend dates at least to Isaac Newton.
After all, the speed of light is really just the speed of causality.
No, the speed of light is the MAXIMUM "speed of causality". A causal connection between events can happen at less than the speed of light. A simple example is hearing thunder sometime after seeing the lightning strike in a thunderstorm. The connection between the two events (lightning flash and the thunder) propagates at ~330 m/s (the speed of sound in air). All relativity tells you is that the connection between two events cannot propagate FASTER than light i.e. you cannot detect any effect of the lightning before it is visible.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
I think any theory on the universe's nature would require extraordinary proof. My theory? Turtles, man. Turtles all the way down.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
If fusion occurs where and how your sources says it is, it should be a simple matter to perform a laboratory-condition demonstration of this effect. If you can demonstrate fusion without the temperatures found at the center of the sun, I might be less disinclined to believe the EU concept.
Don't tell me none of the labs will touch it, though. At the very least, The EU folks should be capable of annoying "mainstream" scientists enough that some mainstream scientist would perform the experiment. Quantum mechanics annoyed Einstein and other physicists sufficiently that they came up with a thought experiment intended to discredit QM.
If such a thought experiment can be turned in favor of QM because of QM's merit (see a Slashdot article from last week or the week before about "spooky action at a distance"), then surely, if EU has merit, experiments intended to disprove EU can be turned in EU's favor.
Come back when that happens. If it already has happened, provide links to and/or names of actual papers, not more sites that describe the theory in layman's terms. Basing arguments on layman's terminology is disingenuous; An analogy can never be more true than the evidence.
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