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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.
The sky is huge. Most supernovas we survive are going to be very far away and are not very bright from our point of view. Therefore you need a big telescope to collect enough light to see them. The bigger the telescope is, the more of a minimum magnification level youâ(TM)ll have. There for youâ(TM)ll only be able to see a small fraction of a percentage of the sky at a time. Projects that survey the entire sky (e.g. those that look for asteroids) can take several months with just one telescope. Most large ground based telescope installations are dedicated to various research projects, usually studying one area of the sky. Not all of them can operate all the time due to weather. Until we have a large array of telescopes in space, itâ(TM)s unlikely weâ(TM)ll be able to constantly monitor the entire sky at any magnitude level enough to catch one off events like this. So therefore, amateur astronomy is still important.
There are a number of projects out there to develop specialised telescopes that will be able to take quite high resolution photos of unprecedentedly large areas of the sky at once, and big enough to gather enough light to show reasonably faint objects without needing too long an exposure. Look at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for instance https://www.lsst.org/. This aims to photograph all of the "available" sky (it's in Chile, so it never sees the stars around the North celestial pole) every few nights for 10 years. There's lots of infomation on their site and in their papers, but a few numbers that jumped out at me: 8.4m primary mirror, 3.2 GPixel camera, 15 TB of data each night!
Even this would have to get moderately lucky to see a supernova as young as this one, which was captured in it's first minutes or hours. It would also, ideally, need to identify what it was seeing almost instantly, so that it (or another telescope) could start a follow-up within seconds or minutes.
Yes, if the supernova is close enough that the increase in neutrinos is recognizable. The problem is, it doesn't give a very good direction. Basically somewhere off to the right. Someone at the detector also has to check the data before they can even determine the direction. Telescopes start searching for the supernova, but may take a few days to check all the galaxies in that direction before they find it. This guy had before and after images in his 1 1/2 hours of data.