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Junior-Sized Supernova Discovered By New York Teen
Matt_dk writes "In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so. Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times more powerful than a nova but 1000 times less powerful than a supernova. Astronomers say that it may be the weakest supernova ever seen."
Astronomers say that it may be the weakest supernova ever seen.
Or the strongest nova..
They're explosions... it only makes sense to relate to things that explode... most exploding things are weapons (and (super)nova).
Standing in a 10m-deep well in the middle of a bright day you will see a piece of night sky, with stars and all, when you look up
I have trouble believing that. Light scatters in the atmosphere; it's not just coming at you in straight lines from each source. Standing in a well doesn't change the fact that the bright, scattered light from the sun or terrestrial sources will reach your eyes and make it impossible to see faint objects. Reducing the amount of peripheral, direct light will improve the situation, but I doubt it will have enough of an impact to be noticeable, and certainly not enough to see "night sky, with stars and all" on a sunny day.
Well, yes...
The thing to realize is, in spite of their related names, a nova and a supernova are fundamentally different phenomena. They happen to have enough similarity (esp. in what's observed) to be named as though a "supernova" were just a nova only bigger, but that obscures huge differences in what's really going on.
AFAIK, neither phenomenon would be expected to produce this kind of mid-range result. Possibly it's a different kind of event altogether. (Must... resist... LHC joke...)
I'd give her a little more credit... I don't know all the details but reading the "Caroline's story" it does sound like she was capturing and processing the images herself (with some assistence in getting going and learning what to do). It might have been "Dad's" observatory and such.. but it still looks like she was doing the work. The co-discovery might simply have been the "hey let me check my data as well..".
The setup that some of these SN hunters is fairly automated, they maintain a list of objects that they will check on a routine basis. A group of SN hunters will sometimes pool their resources, share lists, coordinate what objects they are going to check, etc. The scopes can be automated to jump from object to object, take some exposures, then move on to the next object. The processing of the exposures can be partially automated, but it still requires going through them to determine if it's real or an imaging artifict or a cosmic ray on the image. This used to be done by using an optical blink comparitor (an old school optical box set up where you can quickly flip from viewing one photographic plate to another)
Anyway -- Kudos to Caroline. It's a fun hobby that has been keeping me busy since I was 12 and had access to a 10" Newtonian.