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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."
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.
I'm not a physicist, but I'm given to understand that it's a valid way to look at the universe -- so say something is happening "now" when "now" is the earliest you could detect it given the speed of light.
It's nearly always phrased this way. It was discovered within hours of the initial signal of the explosion reaching earth. Matt Wood
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.
Neither am I, but I'm having to deal with a lot of time and space recently. Even the light we observe from the sun is 8 minutes old. To add insult to injury, gravity has an effect on the rate at which time runs, so an atomic clock at sea level will start to diverge from an atomic clock on a mountain. And our sensory data has a non-zero processing time. All of which makes it astoundingly difficult to even find out when "now" is, much less use that information for anything before it becomes "then."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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 was a Type II supernova, this one ist Type Ia.