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Amateur Astronomer Spots Supernova Right As It Begins (gizmodo.com)
New submitter Rotten shares a report from Gizmodo: Amateur astronomer Victor Buso was testing his camera-telescope setup in Argentina back in September 2016, pointing his Newtonian telescope at a spiral galaxy called NGC613. He collected light from the galaxy for the next hour and a half, taking short exposures to keep out the Santa Fe city lights. When he looked at his images, he realized he'd captured a potential supernova -- an enormous flash of light an energy bursting off of a distant star. Buso took more data and informed Argentine observatories, who announced the outcome of their follow-up observations today: "the serendipitous discovery of a newly born, normal type IIb supernova," according to the paper published in Nature. Not only did this demonstrate the importance of amateur astronomy, but Buso's images also provided evidence of the brief initial shockwave from the supernova, a phenomenon that telescopes rarely capture, since they'd have to be looking at the exact right place in the sky at the right time. Buso didn't just discover a supernova, though. He also presented evidence for the "long-sought shock-breakout phase," as the scientists write, an explosion of energy theorized to emanate from a shock wave at the supernova's source. The researchers point out that it's hard to generalize from a single supernova.
Seriously, I know editing is hard and all, but can you please tell us-- Is this 4 and a half days, 4 and a half weeks, 4 and a half months, or 4 and a half years?
"light an energy" should read, "light and energy" but what's a /. submission without an error introduced by the editor.
Thanks for the nerd news. This made my day.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Is it even legal for ordinary citizens to snoop the skies like this? What if they happen to see something that, for the security of the public, should be kept secret? What if they were terrorists? It's time to put a stop to this, the safety of our children is at stake!
She called me a human super-nova
Yes, one bang and you're finished
In my naivety it seems that surely we must have enough technology to record largely everything in the sky all the time from space. Perhaps not at super amazing resolution, but surely to some degree?
That statement regarding amateur astronomers being important to capture things like this makes me wonder why we should be relying on such things.
Is it a cost thing? Perhaps thereâ(TM)s no will to do it?
Ahh I get it, youâ(TM)re the punch line... because your life is a joke.
Can we call it Buso Nova?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
She called me a human super-nova
Yes, one bang and you're finished
And stuffed into a black hole afterwards...
Given the closest star is 4.5 light years away, and this was supposedly a "distant star" I'd say he didn't capture it as it began. That explosion is hundreds or thousands or more years old, done and over. He saw the initial effects as they reached Earth maybe.
No. That space-time event "happened" when it reached earth. That's how spacetime works: it's all in where you stand.
Time doesn't really have meaning without space because you're just doing matrix transformations on distance measurements between points.
He saw it as it began.
I vaguely remember astrophysicists being excited about neutrino detectors detecting supernovas before you see the explosion, because the neutrinos generated at the center of a supernova had so little mass that they made it through the star's densely packed matter much more quickly than the rest of the energy transmission. Yes, here it is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Real lawyers write in C++
I'm no expert in astronomy or digital image processing - but isn't there a technique for combining multiple lower resolution telescope images into a single high resolution image which is really reliable? What would the feasibility of taking a million of these tiny telescopes rigged with stepper motors for positioning to create a single virtual super-large aperture telescope? Would it be cheaper than the current best ground-based telescopes on the scale of ~100m in total cost?
If his supernova goes bang close to her she is pretty much finished too
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
he spotted the supernova 67 million years after it began.
NASA's budget is $20 billion.
This reads funny:
"... the "long-sought shock-breakout phase," as the scientists write, an explosion of energy theorized to emanate from a shock wave at the supernova's source."
Uh, isn't that pretty much the very definition of a "supernova"? And isn't a supernova even bigger and more bad-assed than a nova, thus making it "super"?
I mean, how do you even have a supernova without an explosion of energy, a shock-breakout phase, and so forth? Suggesting that is "theorized" is a little like saying "we've seen millions of car crashes, but we wish to see the long-sought after 'car' that is theorized to be involved at the very beginning of the crash"!
Just about everyone has the "million to one" quote in their articles - except New York Post which puts the odds at "ten million to one!"