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'Instant Cosmic Classic' Supernova Discovered
chill sends this quote from a news release by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:
"A supernova discovered yesterday is closer to Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away—than any other of its kind in a generation. Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools. 'We caught this supernova very soon after explosion. PTF 11kly is getting brighter by the minute. It’s already 20 times brighter than it was yesterday,' said Peter Nugent, the senior scientist at Berkeley Lab who first spotted the supernova. ... the supernova is still getting brighter, and might even be visible with good binoculars in ten days’ time, appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30 years."
This. But the timing was right to catch the sight of it as the light reached Earth. Still, that's awesomely cool to have had that opportunity.
I read a post like this and I can't help but think that even at its nerdiest, science can be really freaking cool.
Astronomers believe they caught the supernova within hours of its explosion, a rare feat made possible with a specialized survey telescope and state-of-the-art computational tools
An amazingly rare feat, as not only did they catch the supernova right away, they somehow violated the universal speed limit of c in order to do so. Someone call the physics police on "chill" or Soulskill or whoever made that summary.
I am officially gone from
Anybody found a website where it is possible to follow the progression of the supernova in (near) real-time? A brightness graph would be interesting.
Yes... It went nova when our ancestors were still flinging their poo from trees, at giant cats that wanted to eat them!
Nice to see we haven't changed much in the time it took the light to get here.
set M101 to the desktop wallpaper, pity I cannot get a live updating image, but there are some awesome photos of the galaxy outthere
Ok, so every time a discussion about this comes up somebody points out this weird bit of relativity that says, it's actually happening from our frame of reference right now.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
it's actually happening from our frame of reference right now.
Correction: It's happening in those photons' frame of reference right now.
This is close enough that you can see it with a good amateur telescope. The supernova will brighten over time, probably hitting its brightest point sometime in the middle of September. As it brightens it might even be possible to see it with a cheap telescope or a pair of binoculars.
One thing that is important to realize is that this supernova is Type Ia, not Type II. Type II supernovae are what most people are thinking of when they think of a supernova (that is, death of a massive star). A Type Ia supernova instead occurs in a binary system where one of the stars is a white dwarf. The white dwarf slowly steals away mass from the other star until the white dwarf gets too big to be stable, around 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Then it experiences collapse in a way that is essentially similar to that of the Type II supernova.
This supernova was very close to us. One thing that could be very promising is if this left any neutrino signature above the background level. Neutrinos are very hard to detect, the major detectors are things like IceCube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory or Super-K http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande which have very large containers of water or some other substance and you then carefully try to detect the very rare neutrino interactions over all the background radiation (neutrinos are very ghostly and don't interact very much. You have billions of them going through you all the time and you don't even notice). This has only happened with one supernova before SN 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A which was bright enough and close enough to be seen by the naked eye. One really cool thing about this was that we actually recorded the neutrino burst for SN 1987A before the light arrived (three hours before). At this point, most people get shocked because they know that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. What happened was that in a Type II supernova neutrino burst occurs at the very beginning of the supernova process, but the light has to work its way out of the whole star. This actually allows us to potentially detect supernova before they happen, and there's now an early warning network with the major neutrino detectors so astronomers can get a heads-up if a type II is about to happen so they know where to point the telescopes. http://snews.bnl.gov/ Since the neutrino flux drops off quickly (like 1/r^2), supernovae need to be very close to us for to be able to pick out the neutrinos over all the solar neutrinos and general background junk. I don't fully understand the dynamics of Type Ia supernova (and I'm not an astronomer or an astrophysicist) but my impression is that there's also reason to believe that type Ia will produce fewer neutrinos than a Type II supernova. Between that and the distance, this supernova was probably too far away for us to detect any neutrinos.I suspect that the people who run the major detectors are probably looking over their data for the last few days very carefully to see if they can pick up any signal that the regular automated systems missed.
Type Ia supernovae are thought to be potentially the most dangerous if they occur close enough to the Earth. Because these supernovae arise from dim, common white dwarf stars, it is likely that a supernova that can affect the Earth will occur unpredictably and in a star system that is not well studied. One theory suggests that a Type Ia supernova would have to be closer than a thousand parsecs (3300 light-years) to affect the Earth.[108]
[108]: http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt
Well, at least we have 20+ yrs left :)
What's nice here is how quickly it was accidentally discovered. That will be helpful for studying.
It was no accident: it was discovered by a system specifically set up to do a search of the sky every night looking for changes just like this, It is modern computer-assisted observations that made this possible: computers will do the tedious task of looking at the same bit of sky over and over again looking for changes.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Came here to say "In b4 'It was 21 Mio years ago!'". Unfortunately, my message could travel only that fast....
But seriously, guys, relativity isn't exactly "breaking news" today. Everyone knows that it takes a year for light to travel a light-year (DUH!). Don't you have any other way, to show you intellectual superiority?
Which, in a relativistic way of thinking, makes it now: now in 4D spacetime is the set of point from which light travelling by the shortest path would reach us at a single instant.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
the supernova is still getting brighter, and might even be visible with good binoculars in ten days’ time, appearing brighter than any other supernova of its type in the last 30 years.
SN 1987A called to remind about its naked eye visibility.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
That's not so much a correction as a BRAINMELTINGHELPME
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
It's still accidental, in that they don't cover the entire sky.
Not it is not, if the intention was to monitor and capture events occuring within the area of the sky being covered.
Everything a photon experiences is happening right now from the photons frame of reference.
And right here. The universe is a small place if you are a photon.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Not really. There's infinitely much of the universe that the photon can never reach, because from its frame of reference it only travels in a perfectly straight line.
21 million years ago called, it wants its photons back.
It's still accidental, in that they don't cover the entire sky.
I do not think that "accidental" means what you think it means.
And here is a question I have not seen asked.
What do you think "accidental" means?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
So, what they're saying is that if discarding any supernova not of this specific type (type Ia), then there hasn't been any closer for a staggering 20 years?
Yeah, what's so exciting about a cosmic event being observed, better than any of it's type has been in 20 years?
Those astronomers, eh? Getting excited over every single flawless observation of once-in-a-generation events. Honestly, so very uncool.
I mean honestly, what do the editors of this site think- that the readership is nothing but a bunch of nerds or something?
caught the supernova within hours of its explosion
Plus 21 million years!
Plus the supernova wasn't actually "caught", it would be hard to find a baseball glove big enough...
So, what they're saying is that if discarding any supernova not of this specific type (type Ia), then there hasn't been any closer for a staggering 20 years?
Yes. Why do you think that's no big deal?
If the answer is because you aren't interested in the subject in general, then that's fine (though I would wonder why you posted). If you are, then it should be clear that 1) The type of supernova matters 2) It being closer than other recent events of this type matters and 3) studying it with the 20 years of new technology and methodology that have been developed since the last event of this type and magnitude matters. That all spells "big deal".
Yes the rapidity with which they were able to discover and then begin studying it is also a big deal. That is of course largely due to (3) above. So we're studying it earlier and with better instruments than ever before. Both parts of that matter.
So there you go.
The enemies of Democracy are
But YOU, Mr. Anonymous Coward are the paladin of justice who comes to set the record straight, right?
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Just like you have always been a jackass, but since your post just reached me, you are a jackass now.
This post comes with a double-your-money-back guarantee!
Any offense taken to this post is at your sole discretion.
"By happenstance" is as good a synonym as any.
A supernova could have (and possibly has) occurred in the parts of the sky they're not looking.
Or, to put it another way. If I point my telescope randomly at a small but fairly busy part of the sky and compare images from it every night with my computers in the hope of catching an anomaly, and it happens to catch a supernova, would you say that it wasn't an accidental discovery?
I have no idea where the supernovas are going to occur, and neither do these guys. Unless they monitor the entire sky, it will be up to chance whether they catch one or not.
Um, this supernova happened 21 million years ago. How could they have possibly caught it within hours of the explosion as the summary claims?
Accidental means unintentional, usually with undesirable outcomes. Their intention was clearly to find supernovae therefore it was in no way an accident. An accidental discovery would be Hubble taking a picture of the galaxy for other reasons and just happening to catch the supernova. The PTF survey looks at a large part of the sky and has found 858 type Ia supernovae so far.
How did a supernova throw a pie? They don't even have arms!>/p>
OH! coSmic!
Again.
I really think you should look up what accidental means.
I do not mean to be a dick, but at a certain point you need to admit you are wrong or at least shut up.
Defending stupidity only magnifies it.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?