Slashdot Mirror
Supernova 2011b Gradually Fading
An anonymous reader writes "The recent stellar explosion known as 'supernova 2011b' is gradually fading after outshining its host galaxy for over a month. The explosion first flared up in early January, and peaked at magnitude 12.9, putting it within the reach of many amateur telescopes. The host galaxy, NGC 2655, lies 64 million light years away, meaning that the star exploded while the dinosaurs still roamed the planet. My own sketches are available at gkastro.tk/."
Emeril sure gets around.
Home of The Suki Series
Pics or it didn't explode....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
*
I thought the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago?
That means they were already dead for a million years, 64 million years ago.
Putting moderation advice in your
Interestingly enough, the news of the supernova's explosion didn't made it to Slashdot, but it fading away was more interesting somehow. Kinda like when George W. Bush left the office I guess.
A supernova explodes. Slashdot reports 64 million years later.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
If only I would of found out about the supernova back in January! Never seen one before and it is possible that there won't be another within my lifetime. At least I can still find this one in the sky before it completely fades.
Obviously Slashdot can't be relied upon to give us up-to-date news. What sites do you use to be notified of non-mainstream events like this as they happen?
When an event is X light-years away, and we're just seeing it now, people speak of the event "having happened" X years ago, on the grounds that it takes X years for light to travel that distance. But how meaningful is it to think of the faraway event as being exactly concurrent with an earthly event X years ago? Light from faraway shows events from when the universe was/is in a less advanced state, so we may try to think of that as the "past". But in a way, for us, those far away events are really "now". There isn't a previous time at which we could witness them without time travel, not even in principle. Furthermore, the thought that "the event really occurred X years ago" seems to assume a universal standard of time, independent of the location and velocity of the observer, by which far apart events can be ordered. But time is not like that is it?
Have we ever gotten something better than a few light plates worth of data from an in-progress supernova? I.e. an optical (false color or similar) shot of the thing going off?
It would be fantastic if we could see the shockwave of matter grow and distort. The scale of the explosion should be easily identified but I suppose things may be too hot to image optically with known techniques?
New supernovae are detected at a rate of about one a day, and that rate will increase as new survey telescopes go online over the next few years. Overall a supernova goes off about once a second somewhere in the Universe.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Can't you just get the software they use on CSI Miami and click "enhance" like a million times.
The star exploded when dinosaurs were on this planet. If you were in the neighbor of the exploding star (right there when it happens) when it explodes - at the same times, 64 million light years away, we have dinosaurs on this planet. Relativity b.s. It still exploded a LONG time ago - 64 million years ago.
The star exploded in January, not when the Dinosaur's were around.
The Dinosaurs left November to become the Birds.
Translation, it is photographically within the reach of telescopes costing only a couple of thousand dollars, and from a good dark sky location visually within the reach of telescopes costing about as much as a typical reasonably nice used car (that is as a very dim pinpoint). The number of amateur telescopes in the world that can provide a decent view of this object is probably fewer than the number of people that will end up posting in this message thread.
you are an idiot.
The star exploded in January, not when the Dinosaur's were around.
You've got some mighty fast photons then. I mean, just think, how long distance in our reference frame did the photons travel since January? Wow!
Or if you're referring to a January 64 million years ago, I'm sure there are many scientists who'd love to see the math and observations, which let you calculate it was just January, and not for instance Terturary ;-)
one can certainly construct inertial reference frames (e.g. with large velocities relative to us) where the event occurred at different times
There's the key question: are all inertial reference frames equivalent?
I would say that we do have one preferred inertial frame, which is the one where the background radiation of the universe has zero dipole. Of course, considering the expansion of the universe, this preferred frame is local, but it allows us to define a universal "now" for all practical purposes.
A fact that should be always kept in mind is that relativity has been very useful for accurate calculations in dimensions scaling up to solar system size, but this does not mean it can be extrapolated to infinity. The galaxy rotation problem is one fact that has been showing problems with relativity in the last fifty years. More recently, the Pioneer anomaly shows that our orbital measurements are becoming so precise that general relativity needs corrections.
Science is like that, relativity was good enough until the end of the twentieth century, same as Newtonian mechanics was good enough until the final decades of the nineteenth century. But when measurements become so accurate that they do not match the current theory it's time to move on to a new theory.
These days "dark matter" seems very much like Ptolemy's epicycles, a kludge to force new measurements into the old theory.
I created a web page to archive 2011B images:
http://www.RochesterAstronomy.org/sn2011/sn2011b.html
If you would like to take a look at some other current supernovae:
http://www.RochesterAstronomy.org/snimages/index.html
Is this a new slashdot meme?
Maybe you should try understanding what Special Relativity means with respect to the speed of light, events and frames of reference. There is no universal time. When the first instance of an event is recorded that is when the even occurred.
A correct idiot though!
You are completely wrong and do not understand relativity
All space-time events exist and they all have coordinates (x,y,z,t). Space-time is a fixed structure that does not 'evolve' - time is within it. The fact that there is no 'universal time', aka. no privileged frame of reference, just means that there is no fundamental values of the coordinates. Each observer reckons the coordinates to be different. Observers on Earth reckon the 't' coordinate of this supernova to be 64 million years smaller than the 't' coordinate of local events. Observers in other places may reckon a different value. There are many events that we do not know about yet, but may know about in the future.
Here's a thought experiment to disprove your view. Let's say we get in a superfast spaceship which can cover the distance to the supernova in 100 million years (of Earth time), and travel back to the site of the supernova. We collect samples from the site and analyse their age. We return to Earth and deliver the news. On earth , 200 million years pass before we get the news, but the results of the research would be that the samples had aged 164 million years when we collected them (not 100 million as you might expect if you consider that the supernova did not happen until we noticed it).