Slashdot Mirror
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
Can we call it Buso Nova?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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.
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++
Short answer, no. You would not get the angular resolution required unless you synchronize the data feeds. This is done to sub wavelengths of light. The reason is because the air moves. Its why they tend to be on high mountains, above as much air as possible. You have to have precise measurements to factor it out. They do build interferometers that work this way, but they have tunnels connecting them that are either vacuums or controlled environments. You would have to wait hours to days after a person enters one for the air to settle down before use. Other ones are digitally synchronized with custom wiring and atomic clocks. The length of the wires has to be measured to incredible precision to know the timing. It would cost far more to build one the way you suggest than the way they do it now.