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Twitter Helps Astronomers Zero-In On M51 Supernova
astroengine writes "A tweet about last week's M51 (the 'Whirlpool Galaxy') 14-magnitude bright stellar explosion was picked up by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers... who just so happened to be enjoying some observing time on one of Keck Observatory's monster telescopes. Although the weather wasn't perfect, the Berkeley team were able to quickly observe a spectrum from the M51 brightening to quickly confirm that it was a Type II supernova — the core collapse of a massive star, some 8 times the mass of the sun. 'This is the first time that we've been alerted via a tweet,' Alex Filippenko, lead astronomer of the UC Berkeley team, told Discovery News."
The laws of quantum entanglement mean that the electrons coming from hte supernova will be deflected by the twats when they "observe" them and tweet about it -- so this may end up polluting the astronomical signal with so much noise that the supernova's blast will be redirected into another dimesion. Jus another example of how the internet is ruining everything and making everyone stupoider, which is why I never use the internet any more ad neither swhould you!!
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I'm glad Twitter was invented. Remember the dark days when we couldn't communicate with other people using text?
How exactly is this particular case different from the one where another technology (like e-mail, telephone, carrier pigeon...) would have been used?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Is Twitter paying for the slashvertisements? Or are you also going to run stories about how someone found about about something "via phpBB" or "via Mrs. Jones the hairdresser", and so on?
Probably data path propagation, where the former three are mostly one to one (mailing lists are one to a finite number) where as twitter messages are one to many (larger finite number - towards infinity). I don't really know how to describe that further, but you know what I mean. It's not magic, just slightly different.
It's by subscription so you find out whether the sender of the message intended it for you or not, and by its popularity the ratio of the broadcast is large. It could have been RSS or something else, but its showing trends in technology not what could have been. Besides supernovas are cool.
Fine, usenet then.
Or if you really want to get technical ...
Twitter is just a blog where your posts are limited to a ridiculously stupid small post length limit, both are just web pages.
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Oh, yes forums are essentially, twitter I guess, just with less publicity. I just mentioned it in that way for the technologies listed (email, camels, cups and string) but your point stands, of course.
Why in the world is the observation of supernova the secondary topic in this article? How is the use of Twitter for simple communication more important to the explosion of a star 8 times the mass of our sun?
OMG, Twitter is just SOOOO amazing!! Like, wow, how did ugly hairless monkeys like us even survive without it?! I just quit college, cuz, like, math and shit is just sooo booorrring (snore), but I still tweet! I twit and tweet and twat and twittle de do da, whooo hooo! I can do ANYTHING with twitter! It's like zombo.com, only better! Now I'm going to go tweet about this at my astronomy professor, who's such a dweeb he doesn't even know what twitter is ... AND he's such a dork he wouldn't even raise my grade when I offered him a blow job. What a dumb ass.
So the bad news is that this has to do with Twitter. The good news is that the star which went nova wasn't Betelgeuse.
(Ok, yeah, I know that most likely under current models, Betelgeuse going nova won't be that bad for Earth. However, this joke is slightly justified in that last supernova that was visible from Earth 1987A wasn't even a star that we expected to nova. And the neutron star that should be in the remnant still hasn't been found. There's a lot we don't understand about how stars die.)
I'm no fan of Twitter in general as there's an enormous signal to noise ratio but for people that use it it's a convenient service. These astronomers could have set up a network of RSS feeds where events get posted and diligently check them. They could have posted to Usenet and hoped the message propagated fast enough to be useful.
Instead they had Twitter accounts set up so they could send a message by whatever cell phone they had in their pocket at the time and all their followers could pick up on it. They could also just post a message with a hash tag which is a home-grown taxonomy for tweets. Joe Amateurastronomer could have used the #newsupernovas hash tag which professional astronomers might follow. They then turn their nice high powered telescopes and get a spectrum of the event. Astronomers on mountain top observatories with cellular signals but not necessarily reliable internet connections can still receive and send Twitter messages.
The downside to setting up a network of RSS feeds is it's a top-down organization. Astronomers are only going to check the feeds in the "official" list as there's no way Joe Amateurastronomer will get a professional astronomer to look at their feed. With Usenet messages propagate slowly anymore, likely too slow to be useful in this particular situation. That of course assumes astronomers bother to read and post to Usenet groups as so many have been overrun with spam and general crap postings. Few people are willing to run their own network of Usenet servers, they might as well just use more readily (and freely) available web-based systems.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The summary might have mentioned that the tweet resulted from: "It all began on May 31, when French amateur astronomer Amedee Riou detected...." etc.
So several amateurs detected a supernova before the pro's and the pro's heard about it by Twitter? Well that could be one story but as I recall Riou reported the suspected supernova directly to professional astronomers... if so then what exactly is the significance of the later tweet? That some astronomers have crappy official channels and had to find out something of interest form social media instead of being notified through proper/official/established channels? Seem like they should be a bit embarrassed to have to have found out about it by Twitter.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Why is this news? HOW is this news? Astronomy has been happening on the internet since it was the Arpanet. And boy howdy, we had instantaneous communication through this new-fangled thingy called e-mail? You know, it's like the US Postal service...but on a computer! It's amazing! And it's not limited to a worthless 140 characters either. And not prone to randomly going titsup for no reason and showing us that stupid whale.
I mean I know the idiot mainstream media is utterly obsessed with the stupidity that is Twitter but here on Slashdot? Come ON guys, I thought we knew better? I could carry on a better conversation using AOL's instant messenger. ON AOL. Twitter is a limited, worthless waste of time. We used to laugh and say "the internet routes around stupidity" but I guess it doesn't...it pumps it all through twitter.com until the stupid whale appears and we all just keep clicking reload.
I don't recall this kind of breathless reporting about scientific discussion on USENET back when it wasn't flooded with spam. Imagine that: "Scientist Alexander Abian makes breakthrough: Time has Mass!" "Left-wing Pundit John_-_Winston: Aliens are coming!" "Serdar Argic charges US Thanksgiving Turkey with genocide!"
Yea except if you RTFA, "This is the first time that we've been alerted via a tweet," said Filippenko. "We've been alerted many times via email, and in a sense, I was alerted via an email message, but it was from a colleague who was alerted through a tweet."
So yea twitter is great and all, but this guy at the telescope was alerted by good ole email.
I'll leave my post there and inconclusive as you felt inclined to do.
this is only getting media attention because twitter is "hip" these days. supernova hunters don't care how they get tipped off about a new burst, and all kinds of avenues result in rapid assessments. i've heard of text messages, emails, you name it. we have a system for rapidly alerting the supernova community based around email, i doubt that twitter will replace it.
the interesting and cool thing about this is that alex happened to be at keck when the news came through, which allowed him to quickly point the monster scope at m51. supernova usually last for months and months, but it is rare for us to get such early data with such powerful machines. it can only really happen randomly.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Ok, I give up. I admit, I don't have Twitter account, nor do I plan on getting one. Could someone - for the love of God - tell me what's so damn special about Twitter that it's worth using? The whole concept of "Tweeting" sounds like a bunch of dogs barking at the moon and sniffing their own butt.
Life is not for the lazy.
Getting tweets about suns explodin' is a normal occurrence.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Twitter is awesome because it combines the immediacy of lurking in an IRC server along with the permanence of IRC chat logs, with the exclusivity and privacy of a proprietary public web service, without all that needless distributed redundancy or openness! Best of all, it's available for free to everyone* -- even the most computer illiterate website visitor can use it!
* everyone except advertizers or developers who wish to aggregate its data.
Twitter is similar to IRC, except it's accessible via a web page (like mibbit, or webchat.freenode). Essentially: everyone gets their own IRC channel, and Twitter keeps a massive global chat log. To "follow" someone is to /j [roomname]. Each room is permanently OPd by only one user, and no one can have /mode +v except the op. To have a conversation people have to /join each other's rooms or send /privmsg (dm) to each other.
Twitter is also similar to IRC in that the implementers agree the system isn't quite as efficient as it should be, and service errors can occur. Except that when a net-split happens (fail-whale), no one can use Twitter whereas some IRC users may be temporarily disconnected, but can still talk.
Twitter is so much better than IRC, because unlike IRC (or usenet, or a BBS / forum), you are limited to 140 characters, and there is a simple API for advertisers to search a single common database for customer interests and trends. The 140 character limit is neat because it penalizes pompous-assholes that like to use big words like "monosyllabic", and this also promotes URL masking (shortening), so you never know if a link is goatse or not... More importantly the character limit restricts everyone to the lowest common denominator: people sending messages via mobile phones (you know, the dumb phones that don't have an IRC client or Internet capabilities). With Twitter: Now there's no-excuse not to be sharing your most insightful quips with the world at all times!
Twitter is amazing for famous people because they can point to the number of people idling in their chat room and say, "Look at how much marketing potential I have!" even while most people are AFK.
Also, (now, this is the most important difference) Twitter is better because anyone can run their own IRC node and start their own social network, but only Twitter can host Twitter!
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Early data on stuff from Keck, Gemini or Subaru is rare, yeah, unless you have a bunch of Target-of-Opportunity time or can persuade people to take a few shots for you during their programs. But even on Mauna Kea, there are lesser (but still "huge" to most people) scopes where time's easier to get, so when your survey pipeline (from KAIT or PTF or QUEST or whatever you want) throws you a new target, you don't have to wait more than a couple nights before going after it.
We have somewhere around 40% of the time on the 2.2-meter on Mauna Kea, which is our usual tool for going after SNe, although of course some of the bigger names in the collaboration (Perlmutter, Aldering) get time on Keck as well.
If there hadn't been a lightning strike at the 2.2-m during last weekend's snow-and-lightning storm, I would be observing the M51 supernova this evening (and not for the first time). Pesky lightning! :(
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
No, there's a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Ydco co
Any communication medium would have been enough to "help"! ...
From carrier pigeons and smoke signals to telephones and BBSes up to email, mailing lists, web sites and blogs
This claim about twitter should read instead "internet". But then the article would loose a lot ofits glamorous taste, I fear!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
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Because it is Twitter! As we know, anything that involves tweets is instantly newsworthy!
Someone had to do it.
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Rather more importantly, email and web pages (blogs etc) are generally "pull" services, where the user needs to make some action to "pull" the data towards them, whereas Twitter works as a "push" channel with the data being pushed out to people who have elected to have that data pushed at them (in some way).
I guess that things like RSS and Atom feeds blur the distinction. But I can't really give a large enough shit to find out in detail. And I'm considering whether to unsubscribe from Twitter because the three tiny firehoses I sip from are already far too distracting.
Another significant distinction is that Twitter has a nearly universal reach (potentially) ; the number of mobile phones (and therefore SMS recipients) is rapidly approaching the planet's population. Not an infinite number, but large enough.
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