Astronomers Successfully Predict Appearance of Supernova

schwit1 writes: For the first time ever astronomers have been able to predict and photograph the appearance of a supernova, its light focused by the gravitational lensing caused by a galaxy and the dark matter that surrounds it: "The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the image of the first-ever predicted supernova explosion. The reappearance of the Refsdal supernova was calculated from different models of the galaxy cluster whose immense gravity is warping the supernova's light." What makes this significant is that the prediction models were based on the theory of gravitational lensing and required the presence of dark matter to work. That they worked and were successful in predicting the appearance of this gravitationally bent light (bent by the dark matter it passed through) is a very strong confirmation of both concepts.

Comments

Re-Watching a Supernova

[Henning Rogge]

It is a quite interesting thing being able to "re-watch" a Supernova from the beginning because the light has multiple paths towards Earth so we got a "warning" when it will happen.

The problem with a lot of Supernova explosions is that we often don't know what happened in the early phase (until it became bright enough to be noticed in wide-field pictures). It is most likely "a little bit" too far away to learn what type of star has exploded, but it still a great opportunity.

Re:Re-Watching a Supernova

[KGIII]

I'm just waiting for someone to pipe up that DM doesn't exist while not actually knowing what DM is. There are a few people who have valid opinions on it but almost all of the ones that I've noticed don't actually know what it is. (It's not really anything too specific yet, but we've got some ideas and some math. It's a placeholder.)