This supernova has been hyped lately but is not something a casual observer will find to be particularly exciting. It is best seen with a telescope and will appear as a faint dot of light. The brightness will be magnitude 10 or 11, or about 100 times fainter than what the unaided eye can see in dark skies far from city lights. For more information, see
People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the nighttime sky, and we now have the technical means to discover lots of new things.
One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They automatically detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/).
One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale).
There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).
In a funny way it seems like Astronomy is catching up to particle physics. Once you add automation there becomes far to many data points to do anything but compare a model with outside events and look for discrepancy's that suggest either all models are wrong or one model is more accurate than other related models.
Not particularly exciting in the sense of being compared with Hollywood special effects. But I'm excited to look at it through my telescope and know that thing I'm looking at is a star exploding in a distant galaxy. And photons from that exploding star that have crossed 21 million light-years of intergalactic void are entering my eyeballs.
I always have to point this out at the risk of downvotes: it doesn't make sense to say that an event you're currently seeing on Earth "happened 21 million years ago."
Both space and time are relative, so if you're choosing Earth as your reference point, the supernova is happening right when you're seeing it.
I don't know exactly where it belongs/fits in this discussion, but some of the remarks here remind me of the example I have used on occasion that you see lightening before you hear thunder because light and sound travel at different speeds even though they both originate with the same event.
Thanks for pointing this out. I've obviously not gotten my head around the concept of space-time and the article fails to mention this.
Also, http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/superno... is perhaps a more official story. They too don't mention that it's discovery was a few hours after it was possible to observe the explosion, not a few hours after the actual explosion.
Reading things like this always brings me back to the Fermi Paradox [1]. There are lots of stars in our galaxy. Our observation of many nearby planetary systems and our understanding of the chemistry of life suggests life should be relatively common but we've seen no evidence of it.
While life (on Earth) is at times incredibly resilient it's also really fragile. A supernova such as this must essentially sterilize space for light years around it and it bathes its neighbourhood in gamma radiation. Did this kill off some nascent civilization? Supernovas seem to be relatively rare (compared to the number of stars) but think: over billions of years what are the odds that such a thing--or something equally as deadly such as an asteroid or comet impact--won't happen?
Space in incomprehensibly vast. The energy required to travel to even the nearest star systems seems... prohibitive.
I'm inclined to think that there are also simply too many of us on this planet, a problem that we'll either correct or will be corrected for us as resources start to run out in the next century or two [2].
At the moment, not really. In several hundred years it might become a nebula when it will look very different with a telescope. For example look up crab nebula.
Now I wish even more that I were back at school in Providence, the Brown observatory is open to the public. This would be a good humbling beginning to the school year.
[+] [-] japaget|14 years ago|reply
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingbl...
or
http://washedoutastronomy.com/content/another-urban-supernov...
or
http://www.dailycalifornian.org/how-to-spot-new-supernova-in...
[+] [-] mturmon|14 years ago|reply
One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They automatically detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/).
One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale).
There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).
[+] [-] Retric|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobAldridge|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfe|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|14 years ago|reply
Both space and time are relative, so if you're choosing Earth as your reference point, the supernova is happening right when you're seeing it.
[+] [-] Mz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unwantedLetters|14 years ago|reply
Also, http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/superno... is perhaps a more official story. They too don't mention that it's discovery was a few hours after it was possible to observe the explosion, not a few hours after the actual explosion.
[+] [-] mainguy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|14 years ago|reply
While life (on Earth) is at times incredibly resilient it's also really fragile. A supernova such as this must essentially sterilize space for light years around it and it bathes its neighbourhood in gamma radiation. Did this kill off some nascent civilization? Supernovas seem to be relatively rare (compared to the number of stars) but think: over billions of years what are the odds that such a thing--or something equally as deadly such as an asteroid or comet impact--won't happen?
Space in incomprehensibly vast. The energy required to travel to even the nearest star systems seems... prohibitive.
I'm inclined to think that there are also simply too many of us on this planet, a problem that we'll either correct or will be corrected for us as resources start to run out in the next century or two [2].
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
[+] [-] jacques_chester|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thedjpetersen|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvasishth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artursapek|14 years ago|reply