The authors of the paper use measurements of the host star's optical spectrum to infer that it doesn't produce a lot of UV emission, and note that it doesn't have frequent optical flares. That's good news for the habitability of the planet around it, as they point out.
However, they apparently did not note that Ross 128 is a relatively strong X-ray source, as measurements by the ROSAT X-ray satellite show. A colleague of mine worked out the X-ray luminosity of the host star, and it turns out to be not unlike that of the Sun, or even larger. That means that the X-ray flux striking the planet -- which is very close to this host star -- is likely high enough to remove the atmosphere of the planet. No atmosphere means not so interesting a planet, alas.
Astronomers have known for years that the ordinary matter we see every day -- made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons -- can only make up a small fraction of the mass-energy density needed to explain the large-scale structure of the universe. This ordinary, or "baryonic" matter, makes up around 4% of the critical amount. Another 23% or so is "dark matter", which isn't made of protons, electrons or neutrons, but does exert gravitational forces like baryonic matter; and the remaining 73% or so is the very mysterious "dark energy", which acts sort of like anti-gravity.
When most scientists see the phrase "missing matter", they think of the "dark matter" portion of the universe -- the 23%.
But this new result gives us information on a portion of the 4%, the ordinary baryonic matter. We think it should make up 4% of the critical density because of the relative abundances of hydrogen, helium, and lithium which were produced soon after the Big Bang... but when we add up the stuff that we can see with telescopes -- stars and gas -- we find only about 1% of the critical amount. So, about 3% of the baryons were hiding somewhere.
This new study looked at radio waves from an event in a very distant galaxy. Those radio waves had to traverse a very long distance to reach us. As they flew through space, IF that space had even very thin traces of gas, waves of some frequencies would travel just a bit faster than others. That dispersion in frequency acts to spread out the arrival of the radio waves by the time they reach the Earth. The astronomers mentioned here observed a small spread in arrival times and used to to figure out how much gas the waves must have encountered in between the galaxies. The result: just the right amount of gas to account for all those hidden baryons.
So, yes, this study found missing baryons. It did not produce any direct measurements of dark matter or dark energy. On the other hand, if we can pinpoint other fast radio bursts in the future and study their host galaxies, we may learn something about those other entities, too.
My apologies. I should have marked the position of the variable star. I've just modified the web page so that the initial picture indicates the target -- click on that initial picture to see the movie. Thanks for pointing that out.
since you're doing such extensive image processing anyway, why not correct for the blooming of bright stars and make them all the same size and shape?
Well, in part, because I'm an astronomer, not a cinematographer, so my ability to make nice movies is rather limited. I could claim that there's some pedagogical value in seeing the ugly nature of the real scientific images, but, actually, that would just be covering up for the fact that I'm lazy.
Good idea. We astronomers try to eliminate such possibilities by measuring OTHER stars nearby and comparing their variations to those of the target. In this case, nearby stars didn't vary over the night, so we can rule out clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, which would have affected them all.
Now, it's possible that a cloud near the star itself could have something to do with this variation.... but the timescale for motions of such big objects is almost always far longer than a few hours. So, it's more likely that the variations are due to changes in the luminosity of the accretion disk around the black hole than to the motions of a big obscuring cloud in this case.
I've been using our university's observatory to take images of V404 Cyg for the past week. On Jun 23/24, the star underwent a particularly crazy series of variations: over a period of six hours, it fell to just 5 percent of its initial brightness, then recovered almost to its starting point.
I made an animated GIF showing the star's changes over this period. You can see it on my observing log for the the night:
That page also includes my full dataset, and pointers to additional reading.
The star is currently bright enough -- mag 11-14 -- to be studied easily with small telescopes. Anyone interested in joining the effort should start with the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) -- go to their campaign page at
This event is VERY interesting and unusual because the microlensing event was observed from two very different places: on Earth, and from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is many millions of km away from the Earth. Gravitational lensing occurs when a background star and a lensing star line up exactly in the same direction, as seen from an observer. Because Spitzer was so far away, it saw the lensing star line up with the background star first; then, as the lensing star moved in its orbit around the center of the Milky Way, the lensing star eventually lined up with the background star as seen from Earth, about 18 days later.
This lag in time between two widely separated observers seeing a lensing event will help us to figure out exactly how the two stars involved in the event were moving, and where they are, and other properties. Since most telescopes are located on Earth, in basically the same place, we almost never get this extra information.
I'm co-teaching a graduate course on exoplanets, and we talked about this paper in one of our meetings last week. Here's the link to our discussion of "spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres:"
I'm peripherally involved with the supernova field, though I study only the nearby examples. There has been for years the understanding that IF a difference should arise between the nearby events that we can study well, and the distant events which appear dimly and vaguely, AND if we did not realize that such a difference existed, THEN we could reach incorrect conclusions.
Scientists in the field have worried about this for years. It's not a sudden new realization.
It's very pleasant to see that a space telescope -- SWIFT -- which was built to study one type of object (gamma ray bursts) has turned out to provide vital information on a different type (supernovae). Since it is in space, it can detect ultraviolet light, and so show us that some nearby supernovae emit different amounts of ultraviolet light, even though they appear similar in the optical region. This UV difference hints at differences in chemical composition between supernovae, which may indeed be significant when we try to study very distant events with other telescopes.
Fortunately, light from those distant events is redshifted into the optical regime, so we can use very large ground-based telescopes to see the same UV light and compare it to the nearby events.
It's a very interesting field to follow: things change on timescales of 3-5 years. And yes, we are more aware of the uncertainties in the business than some news articles might imply.
When the Moon is full, it rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. Each day, the Moon rises (and sets) about one hour later. So, 2 or 3 days after the full Moon, the Moon will rise 2 or 3 hours after sunset, and set 2 or 3 hours after sunrise.
Which means that, after midnight, the Moon will be high in the sky, ruining the view of the Perseids. It will not "set several hours before dawn."
The team which announced the event has now figured out that it wasn't interesting after all:
TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 16336 SUBJECT: Swift trigger 600114 is not an outbursting X-ray source DATE: 14/05/28 07:57:12 GMT FROM: Kim Page at U.of Leicester
K.L. Page, P.A. Evans (U. Leicester), D.N. Burrows (PSU), V. D'Elia (ASDC) and A. Maselli (INAF-IASFPA) report on behalf of the Swift-XRT team:
We have re-analysed the prompt XRT data on Swift trigger 600114 (GCN Circ. 16332), taking advantage of the event data.
The initial count rate given in GCN Circ. 16332 was based on raw data from the full field of view, without X-ray event detection, and therefore may have been affected by other sources in M31, as well as background hot pixels. Analysis of the event data (not fully available at the time of the initial circular) shows the count rate of the X-ray source identified in GCN Circ. 16332 to have been 0.065 +/- 0.012 count s^-1, consistent with the previous observations of this source [see the 1SXPS catalogue (Evans et al. 2014): http://www.swift.ac.uk/1SXPS/1....
We therefore do not believe this source to be in outburst. Instead, it was a serendipitous constant source in the field of view of a BAT subthreshold trigger.
This circular is an official product of the Swift-XRT team.
If you're interested in the current state of the art, read this article from the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (April 2013). It describes the hardware and software used by the Pan-STARRS team to detect asteroids automatically in data taken with their 1.8-meter telescope on Hawaii and its 1.4-gigapixel CCD camera.
First, this is a type Ia supernova, which produces fewer neutrinos and a much smaller gravitational wave signal than a core-collapse supernova.
Second, any supernova in a galaxy beyond the Local Group (the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and some smaller companions) is too far to produce enough neutrinos or gravitational waves to be detected by our current instruments.
The "expensive AV stuff" is 2 projectors per room (we need to project onto opposite walls because students sitting at tables aren't all facing in the same direction), times 7 workshop rooms. 14 projectors cost a lot to maintain.
Yes, we've completely eliminated traditional labs from the introductory physics sequence.
There is a small amount of data on how students did on the FCI before and after the switch, but not enough to be significant. I don't think that the FCI is a very good way to measure the knowledge of a student in physics, by the way.
When I said "move away from the median student", I mean "teach at a level which is far from that appropriate for the median student." In a lecture, one can choose to go faster or deeper, knowing that one may leave most of the class behind; the lack of feedback makes it easy. In a workshop, because one is so close to the students, one sees the effect and it's hard to ignore it. The question of "should one teach to the level of the median student" is a big one, of course, and I can't address it here.
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago. The students meet in a room with small tables and maximum class size of 42, three times a week for two hours each. The room has equipment at all the tables, so that students can quickly set up small experiments which may not take the entire 2-hour meeting.
I taught in the traditional manner for about seven years, and in this manner for an equal duration. Does the workshop have advantages? Sure: students are less likely to fall asleep because they are often working examples, and because they are in a small, well-lit room. I can walk around and talk to individual students for a minute or two at a time, so I can find those who are having problems and try to help them. It's easy to introduce a concept, give one simple example, then ask the students to do another example, within a span of 20 or 40 minutes. In some cases, this cycle of introduction - observation - action may help students to understand or remember the material.
But there are disadvantages, too: in a workshop, it's difficult to move away from the median student. I can't go too much faster or deeper, because it's clear that many students are not getting it; so some students are held back. I can't slow down for the slowest learners, either, because it becomes obvious that the majority of the class is bored. This approach is MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE than the traditional one, because we need to offer 10 or 15 sections of the class each quarter; that means a lot more faculty time. The rooms can't be used for any other classes, and the AV requirements are pretty steep -- we need to spend around $10K just on projectors each year. We need more equipment than we would have in traditional labs, and that stuff isn't cheap.
It's not clear that this approach causes students to learn any better; some are helped, some are hurt. It's difficult to compare student achievement in workshops vs. lectures, because at the same time that workshops were introduced, we changed the content of our classes as well.
My summary, after years of experience: not a silver bullet, a lot more fun to teach, more expensive overall.
I teach at a large university. My university is pushing for faculty to sign up for on-line courses. My guess is that they see two economic incentives: they can appeal to a larger customer base -- students who can't attend in person -- and they can cut costs by increasing the number of students enrolled relative to the number of professors.
What's in it for me? What do I gain by agreeing to teach on-line? I lose the give-and-take relationship with my students; how can I see if my explanation of a new concept is working if I can't see the expressions of the students as I try to explain it? I contribute to putting myself and my colleagues out of a job. I implicitly support the idea that the best way to teach is to give students videos to watch.
Actually, all of my course materials ARE on-line already. See http://spiff.rit.edu/classes. Anyone who wants to use these materials to teach himself -- go for it! So I'm not lazy, and I'm not trying to keep knowledge secret. I just think that teaching college students in person is better than doing so via web pages and videos.
Alas, we shouldn't expect any neutrinos to be detected from this event. I am an astronomer who studies supernovae, and the Type Ia events --- those due to a runaway thermonuclear reaction inside a white dwarf --- do _not_ produce the same sort of giant burst of neutrinos as core-collapse events.
In addition, this supernova is much, much farther away than SN 1987A. This event, in M101, is about 6400 kpc away, while SN 1987A was only about 50 kpc away. So, in very rough terms, the new SN is about 100 times farther away... which means than the flux of particles from it will be about 100*100 = 10,000 times weaker than that from an object at the distance of SN 1987A. We only detected about 30-40 neutrinos in total from SN 1987A, so, even if this new supernova was a core-collapse event (which it isn't), we might only expect 40/10,000 = 0.004 neutrinos to be detected.
Yes, yes, today's neutrino detectors are larger than the ones operating in 1987. However, I don't think they could make up this sort of difference. And remember, a Type Ia supernova doesn't produce as many neutrinos to start with.
But this should be a good object for people to see through telescopes or (possibly) binoculars!
We're in a job search right now for two tenure-track professors in a Physics Department. None of the five candidates interviewed so far has mentioned Wikipedia. I'm pretty sure that if one did, he wouldn't gain any credit by doing so.
Our department made recommendations for a tenure decision earlier this year. No mention of Wikipedia in the supporting materials for that candidate, nor have I ever seen such a mention. I am pretty sure that neither my colleagues nor the administrators involved in granting tenure would give any credit for editing Wikpedia.
Slashdot Mirror
You can find a freely available copy of the paper at this location:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.000...
Your summary of the paper is correct.
The authors of the paper use measurements of the host star's optical spectrum to infer that it doesn't produce a lot of UV emission, and note that it doesn't have frequent optical flares. That's good news for the habitability of the planet around it, as they point out.
However, they apparently did not note that Ross 128 is a relatively strong X-ray source, as measurements by the ROSAT X-ray satellite show. A colleague of mine worked out the X-ray luminosity of the host star, and it turns out to be not unlike that of the Sun, or even larger. That means that the X-ray flux striking the planet -- which is very close to this host star -- is likely high enough to remove the atmosphere of the planet. No atmosphere means not so interesting a planet, alas.
You can see the figures here for free --- and they provide much of the meat of the study.
http://www.nature.com/nature/j...
http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/...
Astronomers have known for years that the ordinary matter we see every day -- made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons -- can only make up a small fraction of the mass-energy density needed to explain the large-scale structure of the universe. This ordinary, or "baryonic" matter, makes up around 4% of the critical amount. Another 23% or so is "dark matter", which isn't made of protons, electrons or neutrons, but does exert gravitational forces like baryonic matter; and the remaining 73% or so is the very mysterious "dark energy", which acts sort of like anti-gravity.
When most scientists see the phrase "missing matter", they think of the "dark matter" portion of the universe -- the 23%.
But this new result gives us information on a portion of the 4%, the ordinary baryonic matter. We think it should make up 4% of the critical density because of the relative abundances of hydrogen, helium, and lithium which were produced soon after the Big Bang ... but when we add up the stuff that we can see with telescopes -- stars and gas -- we find only about 1% of the critical amount. So, about 3% of the baryons were hiding somewhere.
This new study looked at radio waves from an event in a very distant galaxy. Those radio waves had to traverse a very long distance to reach us. As they flew through space, IF that space had even very thin traces of gas, waves of some frequencies would travel just a bit faster than others. That dispersion in frequency acts to spread out the arrival of the radio waves by the time they reach the Earth. The astronomers mentioned here observed a small spread in arrival times and used to to figure out how much gas the waves must have encountered in between the galaxies. The result: just the right amount of gas to account for all those hidden baryons.
So, yes, this study found missing baryons. It did not produce any direct measurements of dark matter or dark energy. On the other hand, if we can pinpoint other fast radio bursts in the future and study their host galaxies, we may learn something about those other entities, too.
http://advances.sciencemag.org...
The authors have not placed a copy on the arXiv preprint server ... strange.
"Mission of Gravity", by Hal Clement.
My apologies. I should have marked the position of the variable star. I've just modified the web page so that the initial picture indicates the target -- click on that initial picture to see the movie. Thanks for pointing that out.
Well, in part, because I'm an astronomer, not a cinematographer, so my ability to make nice movies is rather limited. I could claim that there's some pedagogical value in seeing the ugly nature of the real scientific images, but, actually, that would just be covering up for the fact that I'm lazy.
Good idea. We astronomers try to eliminate such possibilities by measuring OTHER stars nearby and comparing their variations to those of the target. In this case, nearby stars didn't vary over the night, so we can rule out clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, which would have affected them all.
Now, it's possible that a cloud near the star itself could have something to do with this variation .... but the timescale for motions of such big objects is almost always far longer than a few hours. So, it's more likely that the variations are due to changes in the luminosity of the accretion disk around the black hole than to the motions of a big obscuring cloud in this case.
I've been using our university's observatory to take images of V404 Cyg for the past week. On Jun 23/24, the star underwent a particularly crazy series of variations: over a period of six hours, it fell to just 5 percent of its initial brightness, then recovered almost to its starting point.
I made an animated GIF showing the star's changes over this period. You can see it on my observing log for the the night:
http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/...
That page also includes my full dataset, and pointers to additional reading.
The star is currently bright enough -- mag 11-14 -- to be studied easily with small telescopes. Anyone interested in joining the effort should start with the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) -- go to their campaign page at
http://www.aavso.org/aavso-ale...
... thanks to arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.0410...
This event is VERY interesting and unusual because the microlensing event was observed from two very different places: on Earth, and from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is many millions of km away from the Earth. Gravitational lensing occurs when a background star and a lensing star line up exactly in the same direction, as seen from an observer. Because Spitzer was so far away, it saw the lensing star line up with the background star first; then, as the lensing star moved in its orbit around the center of the Milky Way, the lensing star eventually lined up with the background star as seen from Earth, about 18 days later.
This lag in time between two widely separated observers seeing a lensing event will help us to figure out exactly how the two stars involved in the event were moving, and where they are, and other properties. Since most telescopes are located on Earth, in basically the same place, we almost never get this extra information.
Rah, rah, Spitzer! Rah, rah, OGLE!
I'm co-teaching a graduate course on exoplanets, and we talked about this paper in one of our meetings last week. Here's the link to our discussion of "spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres:"
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/e...
You can read all our materials at
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/e...
Enjoy!
The summary has a link to a paywalled article (silly Ethan). The full article is freely available to all on the arXiv preprint server:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.1706
I'm peripherally involved with the supernova field, though I study only the nearby examples. There has been for years the understanding that IF a difference should arise between the nearby events that we can study well, and the distant events which appear dimly and vaguely, AND if we did not realize that such a difference existed, THEN we could reach incorrect conclusions.
Scientists in the field have worried about this for years. It's not a sudden new realization.
It's very pleasant to see that a space telescope -- SWIFT -- which was built to study one type of object (gamma ray bursts) has turned out to provide vital information on a different type (supernovae). Since it is in space, it can detect ultraviolet light, and so show us that some nearby supernovae emit different amounts of ultraviolet light, even though they appear similar in the optical region. This UV difference hints at differences in chemical composition between supernovae, which may indeed be significant when we try to study very distant events with other telescopes.
Fortunately, light from those distant events is redshifted into the optical regime, so we can use very large ground-based telescopes to see the same UV light and compare it to the nearby events.
It's a very interesting field to follow: things change on timescales of 3-5 years. And yes, we are more aware of the uncertainties in the business than some news articles might imply.
When the Moon is full, it rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. Each day, the Moon rises (and sets) about one hour later. So, 2 or 3 days after the full Moon, the Moon will rise 2 or 3 hours after sunset, and set 2 or 3 hours after sunrise.
Which means that, after midnight, the Moon will be high in the sky, ruining the view of the Perseids. It will not "set several hours before dawn."
In short, the response above is wrong.
And here's a very nice, easy-to-understand explanation of what happened, written by one of the SWIFT astronomers:
http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~pae9...
The team which announced the event has now figured out that it wasn't interesting after all:
TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER: 16336
SUBJECT: Swift trigger 600114 is not an outbursting X-ray source
DATE: 14/05/28 07:57:12 GMT
FROM: Kim Page at U.of Leicester
K.L. Page, P.A. Evans (U. Leicester), D.N. Burrows (PSU), V. D'Elia (ASDC) and A. Maselli (INAF-IASFPA) report on behalf of the Swift-XRT team:
We have re-analysed the prompt XRT data on Swift trigger 600114 (GCN Circ. 16332), taking advantage of the event data.
The initial count rate given in GCN Circ. 16332 was based on raw data from the full field of view, without X-ray event detection, and therefore may have been affected by other sources in M31, as well as background hot pixels. Analysis of the event data (not fully available at the time of the initial circular) shows the count rate of the X-ray source identified in GCN Circ. 16332 to have been 0.065 +/- 0.012 count s^-1, consistent with the previous observations of this source [see the 1SXPS catalogue (Evans et al. 2014): http://www.swift.ac.uk/1SXPS/1....
We therefore do not believe this source to be in outburst. Instead, it was a serendipitous constant source in the field of view of a BAT subthreshold trigger.
This circular is an official product of the Swift-XRT team.
Better luck next time.
If you're interested in the current state of the art, read this article from the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (April 2013). It describes the hardware and software used by the Pan-STARRS team to detect asteroids automatically in data taken with their 1.8-meter telescope on Hawaii and its 1.4-gigapixel CCD camera.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.7281
I wrote up a short summary of the observational details for one of my classes -- you can find it at
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys443/lectures/grb130427a/grb130427a.html
You can also follow a nice summary of the latest results by following Don Alexander's thread on the Cosmoquest forum:
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?143754-GRB-130427A-burst-of-the-(quarter)-century
Oh, rats. I've been working on measurements of SN 2011fe for too long and I had "type Ia" on the brain. You're right, this is a type II. My bad.
It's still too far away to produce detectable gravitational waves or neutrinos, though.
First, this is a type Ia supernova, which produces fewer neutrinos and a much smaller gravitational wave signal than a core-collapse supernova.
Second, any supernova in a galaxy beyond the Local Group (the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and some smaller companions) is too far to produce enough neutrinos or gravitational waves to be detected by our current instruments.
Rats.
The "expensive AV stuff" is 2 projectors per room (we need to project onto opposite walls because students sitting at tables aren't all facing in the same direction), times 7 workshop rooms. 14 projectors cost a lot to maintain.
Yes, we've completely eliminated traditional labs from the introductory physics sequence.
There is a small amount of data on how students did on the FCI before and after the switch, but not enough to be significant. I don't think that the FCI is a very good way to measure the knowledge of a student in physics, by the way.
When I said "move away from the median student", I mean "teach at a level which is far from that appropriate for the median student." In a lecture, one can choose to go faster or deeper, knowing that one may leave most of the class behind; the lack of feedback makes it easy. In a workshop, because one is so close to the students, one sees the effect and it's hard to ignore it. The question of "should one teach to the level of the median student" is a big one, of course, and I can't address it here.
... and it's okay.
At RIT, we switched from the traditional lecture + lab approach to the "workshop" approach about six years ago. The students meet in a room with small tables and maximum class size of 42, three times a week for two hours each. The room has equipment at all the tables, so that students can quickly set up small experiments which may not take the entire 2-hour meeting.
I taught in the traditional manner for about seven years, and in this manner for an equal duration. Does the workshop have advantages? Sure: students are less likely to fall asleep because they are often working examples, and because they are in a small, well-lit room. I can walk around and talk to individual students for a minute or two at a time, so I can find those who are having problems and try to help them. It's easy to introduce a concept, give one simple example, then ask the students to do another example, within a span of 20 or 40 minutes. In some cases, this cycle of introduction - observation - action may help students to understand or remember the material.
But there are disadvantages, too: in a workshop, it's difficult to move away from the median student. I can't go too much faster or deeper, because it's clear that many students are not getting it; so some students are held back. I can't slow down for the slowest learners, either, because it becomes obvious that the majority of the class is bored. This approach is MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE than the traditional one, because we need to offer 10 or 15 sections of the class each quarter; that means a lot more faculty time. The rooms can't be used for any other classes, and the AV requirements are pretty steep -- we need to spend around $10K just on projectors each year. We need more equipment than we would have in traditional labs, and that stuff isn't cheap.
It's not clear that this approach causes students to learn any better; some are helped, some are hurt. It's difficult to compare student achievement in workshops vs. lectures, because at the same time that workshops were introduced, we changed the content of our classes as well.
My summary, after years of experience: not a silver bullet, a lot more fun to teach, more expensive overall.
I teach at a large university. My university is pushing for faculty to sign up for on-line courses. My guess is that they see two economic incentives: they can appeal to a larger customer base -- students who can't attend in person -- and they can cut costs by increasing the number of students enrolled relative to the number of professors.
What's in it for me? What do I gain by agreeing to teach on-line? I lose the give-and-take relationship with my students; how can I see if my explanation of a new concept is working if I can't see the expressions of the students as I try to explain it? I contribute to putting myself and my colleagues out of a job. I implicitly support the idea that the best way to teach is to give students videos to watch.
Actually, all of my course materials ARE on-line already. See http://spiff.rit.edu/classes. Anyone who wants to use these materials to teach himself -- go for it! So I'm not lazy, and I'm not trying to keep knowledge secret. I just think that teaching college students in person is better than doing so via web pages and videos.
Alas, we shouldn't expect any neutrinos to be detected from this event. I am an astronomer who studies supernovae, and the Type Ia events --- those due to a runaway thermonuclear reaction inside a white dwarf --- do _not_ produce the same sort of giant burst of neutrinos as core-collapse events.
In addition, this supernova is much, much farther away than SN 1987A. This event, in M101, is about 6400 kpc away, while SN 1987A was only about 50 kpc away. So, in very rough terms, the new SN is about 100 times farther away ... which means than the flux of particles from it will be about 100*100 = 10,000 times weaker than that from an object at the distance of SN 1987A. We only detected about 30-40 neutrinos in total from SN 1987A, so, even if this new supernova was a core-collapse event (which it isn't), we might only expect 40/10,000 = 0.004 neutrinos to be detected.
Yes, yes, today's neutrino detectors are larger than the ones operating in 1987. However, I don't think they could make up this sort of difference. And remember, a Type Ia supernova doesn't produce as many neutrinos to start with.
But this should be a good object for people to see through telescopes or (possibly) binoculars!
We're in a job search right now for two tenure-track professors in a Physics Department. None of the five candidates interviewed so far has mentioned Wikipedia. I'm pretty sure that if one did, he wouldn't gain any credit by doing so.
Our department made recommendations for a tenure decision earlier this year. No mention of Wikipedia in the supporting materials for that candidate, nor have I ever seen such a mention. I am pretty sure that neither my colleagues nor the administrators involved in granting tenure would give any credit for editing Wikpedia.