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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.
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."-
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.
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.
Stars that massive lose mass rapidly. If this star was as old as theory said it should be it couldn't be as massive as the explosion showed it to be. Oops!
Or something like that, I think.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
(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)
...it's just some omnipontent aliens, building an interstellar highway. Nothing to see here... move along, and don't forget your towel.
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
Here's the Hubble press release and the paper.
You determine the age of a star based on several factors, but it's primarily based on the ratio of elements within the star. The life of a star is a continual struggle between the force of gravity, pulling the star inward, and the force of the fusion process taking place within the star, pushing it outward. As the fusion process continues, the hydrogen is fused into progressively heavier elements up until the point where it reaches iron. Fusing iron creates no net gain in energy, as the fusion process for iron requires more energy than is generated. By measuring the spectrum of a star, the stellar mass, ratio of elements, and other characteristics can be observed, which, coupled with existing data about stellar life cycles, and stellar classifications, can be used to determine the star's lifespan. Figuring out the lifespan of a star isn't new science, the trick here is that they believe their prior models of stellar evolution and stellar lifecycles may be incorrect. And if you actually read the article, you would understand as much because they say it in plain English toward the end.
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.
Perhaps, if they'd managed to convert their entire planet to energy, it would approach the energy of a supernova.
Heh. Just as I said that, I figured I could calculate it; or rather, Google could...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=(mass+of+the+earth)+*+(speed+of+light+squared)+in+joules&btnG=Search
(Assuming the aliens' planet was roughly the size of ours.) Not even, not by 2 orders of magnitude.
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
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
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.
Stellar elements ratios involve the unknown starting ratios. We assume that a star of a given age had predecessor stars of a particular generation, with their elements ratios that they gave up in gas clouds that the star of interest was formed out of. One of the obvious mistakes in the current theory of stellar composition is that fusion stops at Iron. Yes, elements above Iron take more energy than they produce, but that just means that they are a negative contributor to the overall energy state of the star, not that they do not fuse. They will not be formed in high percentages, but they will be formed. So the theory of elements ratios needs to be re-calculated to get what is formed past Iron, and how much Iron, etc is used up in the process. A purely statistical calculation. This is just one example of poor logical thought processes in scientists, acting like the negative energy production is some kind of law that enforces production rules. All our current earthly fusion attempts are negative energy producing. This does not mean that they do not fuse, it just means that they do not fuse a lot, or self-sustaining mode. The post Iron fuse process is not self-sustaining, but it does not have to be, as there is a lot of energy locally available to power it. This does have a significant effect on the core of a star, due to its makeup of heavier, denser elements than Iron, as well as Iron. Where do you think the Uranium, etc in the earth came from? Astronomers assume it all is formed in the novas and supernovas, but some of it comes earlier. It is not an energy contributor to novas and supernovas, either, but they do not say it cannot happen then because of that.
Another relevant mistake is that the stellar precursor gas is of uniform composition. In reality, it can be from more than one generation of star. One reason for this is that bigger stars live much shorter lives, so that parts of a star forming cloud can be contaminated by stars formed out of it which have then supernovaâ(TM)d contributing more gas to it to form stars which are actually mixed generation stars. This must have occurred for every generation of stars except the first big stars. But, more importantly, different sizes of predecessor stars end up producing gas of different compositions for starting new stars.
Also, the stellar life cycle theories do not explain what happens to Lithium. Lithium is formed early on in stellar fusion, and is not found nearly as much in old stars as is expected. One period where stellar evolution is not currently understood, and where the Lithium actually disappears, is when the young star blows off its surrounding gas cloud, making it visible for the first time in its life. My theory? That in-falling matter finally hits the young, Lithium-rich star with enough energy to set off a self-sustaining Lithium fusion explosion on the star's surface. this shock wave not only propagates through the star, fusing most of the Lithium in the star, and using it up, it also blasts the obscuring gas cloud away from the star, ending the growth phase of the star, and revealing it to the universe. Kind of like the star comes out of the womb.
As long as we do not have a clear, well-understood total life cycle of a star, we will continue to have issues with stellar composition, and stellar age calculations from stellar composition, and age-related events in the stellar lifetime, like the end event nova/supernova. We currently do not even understand the Oxygen levels in our own sun right now, and theory calculates a level way off from what it appears to be. We have to get this stuff down to an accuracy of better than a factor of two to be calling out stuff like novas with an accuracy of better than a factor of two. And since Lithium and Oxygen do not calculate out to within a factor of two right now, we should not be stating things without including an uncertainty figure, which Phd scientists tenured at universities are loath to do. They tend to make statements as if they were fact, making them feel like big, knowledgeable men, when
wake up and hold your nose