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Light Echoes Solve Mystery of Tycho's Supernova
Ponca City, We love you writes "Powerful telescopes in Hawaii and Spain are using 'light echoes' from the original supernova explosion that have bounced off dust in the surrounding interstellar clouds to identify the precise type of supernova that Tycho Brahe saw 436 years ago. Although the echoed light from Tycho's supernova is around 20 billion times fainter than the original light observed in 1572, the team took identical images of the sky a few months apart and then digitally subtracted one from the other to find evidence for several sets of light echoes rippling across patches of dust in the northern Milky Way. 'Using light echoes in supernova remnants is time-travelling in a way, in that it allows us to go back hundreds of years to observe the first light from a supernova event. We got to relive a significant historical moment and see it as the famed astronomer Tycho Brahe did hundreds of years ago,' said Tomonori Usuda, of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Tycho's original observations were particularly important as he immediately concluded that the new star, visible even by day, could not be closer than the Moon challenging the Aristotelian view of the cosmos, widely accepted since ancient times, which held that the sky beyond the Moon never changed."
That is really cool. Like some kind of galactic diff.
Did anyone else know that web comics predated the Internet? Tycho Brahe has been keeping it real for hundreds of years!
http://www.penny-arcade.com
There was a supernova in that crater on the moon?
"Light echoes?" Is there something wrong with the word "reflections" now? Hmm, let me just check my light echo in the mirror..yep, still pretty.
Amazing work though, from my laymans perspective it seems incredible that they can get usable data in this way.
Oh no... it's the future.
R.I.P. Monument Builders
Work done by an officer's doppelganger in a parallel universe cannot be claimed as overtime.
Here's a link to the supernova in question. Also, here's Brahe himself. Remember that all his observations were naked-eye - pre telescopes.
This could be used to determine distances very precisely. If we know when that light was emitted and we know the speed of light, then we can calculate with great precision the distance from the star to the reflecting dust cloud.
When can we point our telescopes at an object hundreds or thousands of lightyears distant, and pick up the light reflected back at us that previously traveled from Earth to that object, then reassemble it into images? Images of the Earth's past, twice as old as the lightyear distance of the object?
We could look at an object 1000 lightyears distant for reflections of Jesus being crucified. Search among objects 250-600 lightyears distant for reflections of people arriving in the "Americas" on ships before Columbus. 176ly distant objects could show us images of Newton getting hit by a falling apple.
Finally a use for the combined computing power of all Earth's computers.
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make install -not war
I'm amazed that he was able to observe that and figure out that the common concept of the sky was wrong at the time. I can't imagine how much thought must have gone into something like that.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Tycho: I saw a light in the sky that looks like an exploding star.
Scientific community: We don't believe you until we can see it ourselves. Neh!
...continues to bring surprises like this. I'm just wondering if this is the same method we astronomers use to detect local masses such as transneptunian planets (or "Plutoids", if you will) or asteroids or -gulp!- Near Earth Objects such as the Saturn V Stage discovered and misidentified as a natural coorbiting body a couple years ago? Could light ripples be detected and identified on a pair of plates of the same patch of sky taken a year apart?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I hate those expressions! That implies that the original light was faint. But faint compared to what? Why not just say that it was 1/x-th the brightness of the original event's visible light? The echos/reflections are relative to the original, in terms of what makes the story interesting. Both the original event and the reflections are found on some hard scale of luminosity, but that's not referenced... so why the awkward, un-anchored, and thus meaningless reference? Grrrr. 20 billion times fainter than the original... which was what? Half as bright as the full moon? Brighter than the sun? Brighter than an ascending science journalist or summary writer?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
too bad Tycho was too stupid to get to the bathroom on time, though...
Tycho Brahe had a nose made of silver and gold.
And his friend had copper knickers.
Couldn't hold his pee pee!
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Tycho Brahe had a nose made of silver and gold. And his friend had copper knickers.
And he got a moose drunk.
I'm still trying to figure out what contribution this "discovery" (reenactment?) brings. It's neat they can use this light echo technique to reconstruct a supernova, and it's nice they can now definitively classify Tycho's supernova, but everything else seems to be already known. Even the technique they used to do it doesn't seem new. Is there some new contribution to astronomy here or are they just showing off?
And he died from trying to hold in his piss during a drinking game.
And his dying words were, "Let me not seem to have lived in vain". I've always found that haunting. Aren't we all just full of Tycho trivia?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
And he died from trying to hold in his piss during a drinking game.
While playing Prince of Persia
Tycho's elk and dwarf
Tycho was said to own one percent of the entire wealth of Denmark at one point in the 1580s and he often held large social gatherings in his castle. He kept a dwarf named Jepp (whom Tycho believed to be clairvoyant) as a court jester who sat under the table during dinner. Pierre Gassendi wrote[6] that Tycho also had a tame elk, and that his mentor the Landgrave Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel (Hesse-Cassel) asked whether there was an animal faster than a deer. Tycho replied, writing that there was none, but he could send his tame elk. When Wilhelm replied he would accept one in exchange for a horse, Tycho replied with the sad news that the elk had just died on a visit to entertain a nobleman at Landskrona. Apparently during dinner[9] the elk had drunk a lot of beer, fallen down the stairs, and died.[10][6]
love is just extroverted narcissism
And he died from trying to hold in his piss during a drinking game.
The moose won.
http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2008/12/03/index.html
As the article suggests, the biggest benefit of using light echoes is that the SPECTRUM of the original supernova can be obtained. In other words, while today we mostly see the direct-path light emitted by the supernova's gas remnant, light echoes let us see all the wavelengths of the light emitted at the time of the explosion.
Alejo
Was he playing D&D 436 years ago? There was no XBox back then o_O
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all these high powered telescopes that can 'supposely' see 10000000000x millions of light years away and yet there are no close up's of the moon, the flag on the moon, the machines left on the moon or any other human impact images of the moon from multiple sources across the world. No images exist except those from the 1969.
why? Think about it.
I guess the same way that "sound echoes" are different from "reflections", or that "radar echoes" are different from "reflections", etc. Perceive an event once, it may be a reflection. Perceive the same event twice (or more), it is an echo.
This fact is the only thing I actually remember from high school physics.