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Huge Supernova Baffles Scientists
Iddo Genuth writes "Scientists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and San Diego State University have observed an explosion of a star 50 times larger than the sun. In what they call a 'first observation of its kind' the scientists were able to notice that most of the star's mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a creation of a large black hole. While exploding stars, or 'supernovae,' aren't unprecedented, this star, which lay about 200 million light years away from earth and was million times brighter than the Sun, has exploded as a supernova at a much earlier date than the one predicted by astronomers."
Clearly all this proves is that we really don't know that much about what's going on in the universe.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
was million times brighter
er... in soviet russia, editors grammar check you?
Now they "accidentally" blew up a star. Great!
It wasn't supposed to go nova now, but it was part of God's plan so that our ancestors would know the way here after peeking in the Temple. They could've had more time to look around, but their enemies were right behind them.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
boom!
The scientists got a slight off line on an Exponential Equation and this caused the time theory relation to size and power to go off just alittle and make it off by a certain amount of time...
One incident in a static subsystem in isolation with the rest of the system may disprove a theory about that subsystem, but the universe is dynamic whole, so this incident doesn't say much except for what it is, a weird incident. For all I know it could have been a Death Star committing suicide by shooting at a sun 200 million years ago.
is this the first time that we have seen a black hole created? I am just wondering if it is possible that a black hole came in behind it and caused this?
Opps, I think a star missed his anger management class.
Yeah, that is big black hole.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I know ZPMs are rare... but he really gotta get a hold of himself. PS: I welcome our star blowing overlords... looks like you really dont wanna get on their bad side
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
This one was clearly lying about its age.
But since it was 200 light years away, that means it actually happened 200 years ago, right?
Talk about old news...
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
the scientists have identified a star potentially close to explosion, whose mass was estimated to be equal to 50-100 Suns. Their observations revealed that while a small part of the star's mass was "flung off" in the explosion, most of the material, according to Gal-Yam, was "drawn into the collapsing core as its gravitational pull mounted." In subsequent images taken of that region of the sky, the star does seem to have disappeared, which led the astronomers to conclude that it has, indeed, become a black hole.
The explosion of such an 'immature' star has led scientists to put existing theories of stellar evolution to doubt - "This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars, and that theories need revising," said Gal-Yam
How did they figure out the star's age? Without a link to the original research, this article just sounds like one picture where a bright dot is there, and another picture where they can't see it anymore. If that's all we've got, I don't see why we need to rewrite solar physics.
This thing exploded earlier than expected? Perhaps we should start underestimating the life of our own star.
Yep, Proof of Alien life right there.
And by alien life, I mean Pierson's Puppeteers
.
.
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Take that, science.
It would really suck if a massive gamma ray burst from that supernova screwed up the rest of this pou3u7IU89&&bu*8389*(&Y(*(¥¥90øioiuuy
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Apparently, they've fixed their LHC.
> '...Baffles Scientists'
And we all know just how difficult that can be to accomplish these days.
(eying the sun nervously)...
One is that this was a binary system, that a second star was behind the first at the time of the "pre-supernova" photo, and that they collided. Remember, they have very few photographs, are not using any data from space telescopes like SWIFT, and are therefore filling in the blanks.
We can assume that star evolution is moderately well-understood (though not completely), so if what they think is the input is inconsistent with what they know is the output, the chances are really good that the input is wrong, especially with such little data.
Another possibility. In order to get a supernova, as TFA notes, you need iron at the core of the star. There is no requirement that the iron be formed by the star, so there is no requirement that the star be at a stage in its evolution to have formed said iron. I don't know how large a rocky planet can get, but it's entirely possible to theorize of a bloody massive exoplanet made largely of iron dive-bombing a star. Depending on how close to critical the star is, it's possible to imagine such a strike giving a supermassive star severe indigestion.
There again, they may have miscalculated the distance. I believe they rely on spectral analysis to determine the relative velocity of a star and use that to infer distance, as you can't use parallax at those kinds of distances. However, if the star was getting close to critical, the spectral patterns can't necessarily be assumed to follow those of stars in better health. Further, if the star's movement was not primarily due to the expansion of space, the measured Doppler shift won't be directionally proportional to distance.
These reasons have probably been gone through and either discarded, laughed at, or even maybe put in the "improbable but should be looked at" pile, but it's very reasonable to assume the astronomers themselves have come up with many, many more possibilities, all of which could be valid based on what little is known.
And that's just it. Very little is known, unless one of the rapid-reaction space telescopes detected the explosion and took a look. TFA makes no mention of such data, but given the volume they process maybe that information hasn't been looked at yet. But I suspect the mystery won't be solvable unless such extra data does exist.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm totally calling it.
...it's just some omnipontent aliens, building an interstellar highway. Nothing to see here... move along, and don't forget your towel.
A large gravitational force passing by this star might have a significant effect. The fact that only part of this star completely collapsed seems like possible evidence of ... a moving black hole?
---don't make me break out my red pen.
Those pesky Cylons are up to it again!
Yeah, that is big back hole.
Someone dropped a stargate into it.
The next Slashdot poll should ask which alien race is responsible for this. I'm voting for the CowboyNealiens.
You science people have completely missed the mark. The Messiah has come to end the world and take the faithful home!
Luminous Blue Variables (like Eta Carine) are so massive and so bright that gravity can barely hold them together. Should it be such a shock that such a star might blow itself apart given their inherent instability.
Corporatism != Free Market
there goes another civilization with a Hadron sized super collider. Just when they thought they were on the edge of something, they collapsed into something much much much much much much smaller. ;-0
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Here's the Hubble press release and the paper.
That's such a shame. We could have learned a lot from a civilization advanced enough to build a super collider the size of a Hadron.
'Happened earlier than expected' Duh! This star died about 200 million years ago.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
there goes another civilization with a Hadron sized super collider.
Wow, talk about miniaturization!
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
U.S. Federal agencies have requested Dr Manhattan to assist them in their enquiries regarding the supernova incident, after anomalies were detected on Mars....
Me too. Those posts show nothing but the envy of people who wished they understood science, but do not have the needed energy and intelligence to study the necessary mathematics.
Their escape mechanism is to pretend no one really understand science. They think they don't look so stupid if they can pretend everybody is as stupid as they are.
I think the perfect answer to that kind of thinking was given by Isaac Asimov in an essay named "The Relativity of Wrong". In that article, Asimov shows that the difference between a flat earth and a spherical earth is much bigger than the difference between a spherical earth and the true shape of the earth. Although people who thought the earth was spherical were wrong, they were much *less* wrong than people who thought the earth was flat.
Science converges asymptotically to the truth. Even if scientists can never be absolutely certain of the truth, they are always getting nearer to absolute truth.
modded a troll for calling a spade a spade. I wonder how you would react if you was in my shoes I put in work and did the dirt, that's how I payed my dues Uh, 1-2-3, that's how it be So all the real niggaz step up like the playas that's in back of me
Damn! I hate it when that happens.
Have gnu, will travel.
linus is a bitch and you're a total fag for quoting him.
Oh Wan-To, you old crazy bastard.
According to the article it exploded in 2005, but if it's 200 million light years away, doesn't than mean the event happened 200 million years ago and we're just seeing the light from it now? ..but I could be way off base here.
This was in the papers 200 million years ago, and is just now being heard about on earth? If you're that far behind, you're in for a few surprises with all the stuff that's happened between then and now.
Very few scientists in other fields consider economics a legitimate science. In its partial defense, it's studying very complex phenomena--- considerably more complex than understanding the weather, for example, which is itself no cakewalk. On the other hand, economics doesn't seem to really understand that it's dealing with complex dynamical systems, and has been extremely slow to import the tools now standard in all other areas that deal with complex dynamical systems (including weather). Instead they seem to rely mainly on equilibrium assumptions that are unlikely to ever be even approximately true.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Most scientists don't understand science, outside their tiny provincial field; I'm a scientist so I see this all the time. Most have very fairy-tale notions of the scientific method and knowledge production in particular.
You might want to read up on some of the people (scientists especially) who have taken the time to understand how science works, and written on the philosophy and sociology of science.
In particular, it is certainly not true that science converges asymptotically to the truth. It oven diverges substantially, sometimes for hundreds of years, before entire fields (like "racial hygiene") are thrown out as failed experiments. We're currently in the middle of a debate over whether string theory should be placed in that dustbin or not, for example.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If they can go nova sooner that increases the chance I'll live long enough to see Betelguese go super nova and that would be spectacular.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Colonel Samantha Carter launched a Stargate into a star, causing a sudden change in mass..
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
LOL! says you, just another ignorant bastard and an AC too.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
delt it!! obviously, this is just a big fart.
While exploding stars, or "supernovae," have been previously detected using advanced research satellites
I witnessed what I thought was the end of Ursa Major about 3 years ago. It was so bright, the sky around it turned blue, and then one of the stars was missing. I never saw a single report about it.
....... use black holes as their transportation method needed another stop in the neighborhood, so they constructed one.
Finally, we know what happened to the elusive Q-36 explosive space modulator! And there was a kaboom, too!
dey duk er jubs
Bloody photino birds!
"Now... Tell me all you know about... Trilithium."
Set shield harmonics to 257.4, folks, and grab that Red Shirt. We'll need him soon.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Socrates...
We have made some progress since then. For once, we know that Earth is round.
Sorry to put a damper on you, but that's not progress. Sokrates was about 400BC. Pythagoras proclaimed round Earth in the 6th century BC. Aristoteles reasoned in the 4th century BC in "About the heavens" with horizon, with the difference of stellar patterns from North to South, with the shadow of the Earth on lunar eclipses. If you manage to pull even half as much insight from a typical high school graduate (rather than rote "the Earth is round"), you'll be lucky. In the late 3rd century BC, Eratosthenes determined the Earth's circumference by measurements of inclinations, with rather startling accuracy.
So not much progress here. Particularly not in the area of hubris.
Looks like the Asgard saved earth from another Replicator threat by collapsing a sun and trapping the creepy critters in its resulted black hole ...
That this happend at a time the scientists didn't expect shows how very little we still really know about Out There.
Anyone ever read The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven? (It's on the N-Space anthology) that touches on unexpected supernova...
maybe it was some big gun from a very advanced race of star destroying 'people'. and now we are gonna base our knowledge on their test firing?
I read this 3 days ago here. So, when the theory and the facts disagree, what do we do, class? Yes, that's right. We discard both.
Asimov may have had a PhD in science, but he did nothing of note in science, spending virtually his entire adult life writing science fiction and popular-science works, and virtually none of it writing peer-reviewed journal articles actually on scientific topics. His writings, unsurprisingly, therefore tend to take the mythologized view of science common in sci-fi and pop-science.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I blame the photino birds.
That's what this one sounds like. I read about it a while ago in an article I'm ashamed to say I can't locate at the moment. Basically, (stop me if I'm all mixed up here) the theory is that a runaway chain reaction (wholly different from that of the common supernova) begins from within the star, causing it to collapse much faster and well before its predicted life expecatancy. The result is also a much more powerful super/hypernova that is also much brighter. It is believed that such a reaction can occur in any star, regardless of its age (including our sun), and astronomists have identified at least one star located relatively close to our solar system that is in particular danger of undergoing a pair-imbalance hypernova. It is believed that if this were to occur, the explosion would appear brighter than the moon, and may even have kinetic effects on our planetary system.
Get a CS degree. Use your work experience that you had, plus your CS degree to be a project manager. You will make a ton of money and not have to work as hard as the programmers.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
The only ancient culture I've read about that thought the earth was flat is early Babylon. Any people that either had ships on a large body of water, or were in contact with people that had ships on a large body of water, knew that the earth was round. You can't see a ship disappearing over the horizon and miss the implication.
As to Socrates, the Greeks even calculated the size of the earth pretty accurately.
The legend of people believing in a flat earth came from a work of pseudo-historical fiction by Washington Irving about Christopher Columbus, in which the author takes a lot of creative license.
Us modern types manage to have a Flat Earth Society despite this.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's SUPERNOVA! Strange visitor from another galaxy...
Free Martian Whores!
Somewhere in the last few hundred years, the myth was started that people back in the day thought the Earth was flat. It was designed to make religious people appear ignorant.
http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Well, at least they found out exactly how much the God particle weighed, just before their hadron collider blew them up. Know-it-alls.
wake up and hold your nose
This is just proof that we still know very little about what we have been looking at in the deep sky. We're still trying to figure out how our own planet works and we even have every type of probe, sensor, and satellite known to man pointed at or stuck into the Earth trying to figure it out. What makes anyone think they know anything for sure about the rest of the Universe?
This is old news! It happened 200 million years ago, and /. is just reporting it now? Come on, mods, get with it.
:P
At least it wasn't a dup.
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
There's clearly much much more than we can even comprehend.
How old will you be if you don't go back to school?
I assumed he meant something stronger about things on human time scales, roughly that science accumulates truth with relatively minor setbacks. If you take asymptotic convergence literally, then yes you're correct, but it's also a useless statement, because it's possible for science to asymptotically converge to the truth without *any* science in the present day or for the next 5 million years to be true.
Presumably he didn't mean a statement as weak as, "science will one day converge to the truth, even though it might be the case that all of science that we've ever done is wrong, and all science for the next several million years might also be wrong".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...this was the work of a Vogon constructor fleet to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. Can't fall behind schedule after all.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Oh ya submitter well Uranus baffles scientists too!
Tolian Soran exploded the star.
Really, why couldn't this be some alien race blowing it up to partially exterminate an enemy?
If the only claim is that science converges in the limit to truth in the mathematical sense, then the statement is about as good as not saying anything at all about science, since it literally says nothing at all about science's accuracy within the next 5 million years. I assumed the great-grandparent poster was making some sort of claim about the convergence of science towards truth on human timescales.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The existence of dark matter does not invalidate one single fact of what was known before.
Actually it does. You see before this the options of the end of the Universe were always continuous, slowing, expansion, expansion to s fixed size or recollapse. Now we know that all of these are wrong and we will actually have a continuously accelerating expansion.
Newtonian phisics is still valid
It is actually very ironic that you chose this because, in fact, one explanation of Dark Matter is to use modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) on large distance scales. This is becoming increasingly unlikely (the Bullet cluster was almost a shot to its head) but it is still not ruled out.
Asimov was right, we are getting closer to the truth.
Yes we are, but that was not entirely what Asimov was saying - he was also claiming that the steps we took towards the truth were getting smaller because we were closer to the destination. My point is that we still have no idea yet how far we have to go. We might be heading in the roughly right direction but sometimes we take baby steps and sometimes we take huge strides. Asimov's point that we are asymptotically approaching the truth is demonstrably wrong.
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Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."