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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.
But since it was 200 light years away, that means it actually happened 200 years ago, right?
Talk about old news...
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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.
Or, an alien species shot a missile into Sun to collapse it for their own purposes.
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.
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"Life here began out there." These are the first words of the Sacred Scrolls!
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.
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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.
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
The good thing is, it's hard to ignore an exploding star. You can't just write it off as an anomaly, within acceptable standard deviations, or a measurement error.
There still exists a great number of well-known anomalies which occur in for example electronics design, and yet we seem to think we know all there is to know about EM. The memristor is the latest instance of an 'anomaly' being transformed into what promises to be revolutionary technology. Yet, heaven forbid anybody but a select few favourite names rock the boat, proposing something new. If you think you're on to something exciting, you don't quite understand it but you do dare open your mouth about it, you'll be labelled a crank or worse ignored faster than Occam's razor is invoked on Slashdot.
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