Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Nebula

pease1 writes "The BBC is reporting on an amateur astronomer in the US who has detected, using a tiny 3-inch telescope and a CCD camera, the emergence of a young star from the cocoon of gas and dust in which it was born. The discovery image is here. Within hours, some of the largest telescopes on Earth had been redirected to image the new find. If you have a larger telescope and are heading out this weekend, here is a good finder chart, as this object has been sighted visually."

You might remember me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such amateur-astronomy instructional films as "Point that Scope Up, Not at your Nude Neighbor" and "Sun Viewing: the Sad Tale of Blind Bobby".

If you call this 800 number, you can get a special deal on my Comet Kahoutek documentary.

Re:You might remember me.

[Bazzargh]

Oh fer crying out loud moderators, the parent is not offtopic. Whether it's funny or overrated is up to you.

Anyway, I'm left wondering at the lack of tabloid sensibilities in the journos covering this:
"New star emerges from dust cocoon" (BBC)
"Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Nebula" (/.)

Erm, great headlines guys. What the heck happened to "A Star Is Born"? "Twinkle twinkle little star"? "Every nebula has a silver lining?" or even "A long time ago and far, far away"?

-"Lunchtime O'Booze"

It makes me wonder ...

[Glog]

... how do you even go about finding a new celestial body/galaxy? Isn't there some central database which contains all of the current known stars/galaxies/nebulae?

You can plot all of the locations on a virtual sky and start looking in the directions that have been explored the least.

Then all you have to do is get a cluster of amateur astronomers, line them up behind telescopes and voila you got yourself a mega super duper star-finding array (tm)?!

Hmm, I guess the three-dimensionality of the Universe does

Re:It makes me wonder ...

[kalidasa]

There are plenty of databases. This isn't a sudden discovery of something that was always there - when it comes to deep space (i.e., not solar system) objects, you wouldn't find anything that had always been there and that wasn't already known using just a 3 in. scope; this is an honest-to-goodness new star that just started lighting up the surrounding nebula.

Not "just..."

[brownpau]

>this is an honest-to-goodness new star that
>just started lighting up the surrounding nebula.
Well, strictly speaking, since M78 is 1,630 light years from Earth, it hasn't *just* started lighting up. ;)

Re:Not "just..."

[kalidasa]

Very, very good point :-)

Re:Not "just..."

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was a very pointless point.

Maybe I know too much, but to me, it's kind of stupid to say that. Everyone knows what was ment when he said it just lit up.

Re:It makes me wonder ...

[Glog]

Hmm so if I understand correctly the location of most stars visible with a 3'' telescope are known and so the chance of finding a new one is equivalent to spreading a bunch of candles on a football field and waiting for one of them to spontaniously combust?

Re:It makes me wonder ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not stars, per se, but nebulosities, because they are easy to mistake for comets and so tend to be well documented and well known to amateur astronomers, many of whom do a lot of comet hunting. From looking at the finding charts, it looks like this was a known dark cloud that has just been lit up.

Re:It makes me wonder ...

[MissMarvel]

Many of the objects amateur astronomers observe can be found on the NGC/IC Project [ngcic.org] website. This is a particularly fine reference because it includes many corrections to the current NGC(New General Catalogue) and IC(Index Catalogue).

As a point of interest, Brian Skiff of Lowell Observatory and a team member of the NGC/IC Project, was instrumental in assisting McNeil in securing telescope time on the giant 8-meter Gemini telescope in Hawaii so followup observations of the newly discovered nebula could be made.

Other members of the NGC/IC Project team are Harold Corwin, Steve Gottlieb, Wolfgang Steinicke,Brent Archinal, Steve Coe, Glen Deen, Jenni Kay and Bob Erdmann.

Here's the article text for slow connections

[scumbucket]

New star emerges from dust cocoon
By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor

An amateur astronomer in the US has detected the emergence of a young star from the cocoon of gas and dust in which it was born.

Such an event has only rarely been recorded by astronomers.

"This is exciting for all astronomers, especially those interested in the birth of stars," University of Hawaii astronomer Bo Reipurth told the BBC.

"We tend to think of the sky as fixed and unchanging, so when we see something new it's important," he said.

The new object was first spotted on 23 January by amateur astronomer Jay McNeil from his observatory at Paducah in Kentucky.

"The entire discovery was quite serendipitous in nature," he told BBC News Online.

While looking at star formation regions in the constellation of Orion, he noticed a star not present in previous sky surveys.

"I have spent countless hours seeking out the darkest of skies and peering into the largest of telescopes at distant galaxies, so who would have known that I would take an image of a famous object with a small telescope from my back yard and find a sun-like star being born."

The new object had appeared alongside the well-known gas cloud known as Messier 78.

"The new object was just a faint smudge. I contacted Brian Skiff at the Lowell Observatory who also realised it was new," says McNeil.

Suspecting that it was a young star that had just broken out of its birth cloud of gas and dust, McNeil then contacted star formation expert Bo Reipurth.

Reipurth arranged for follow-up observations to be carried out using the University of Hawaii 2.2 metre telescope, and then using the giant 8-metre Gemini telescope, also in Hawaii.

McNeil was amazed at the train of events following his discovery, "The idea that this thing, first seen on my 3-inch telescope, which one can easily hold using one hand, would be observed, within 48 hours, by a telescope of 342 tons was absolutely staggering."

Following those observations Reipurth told BBC News Online: "The young star was embedded in its placental nebula. Now it has brightened, and like a lighthouse it is casting its light across the landscape of dust and gas around it."

"We know of many small nebula like this scattered throughout the sky but it is very rare to see an event like this. We know very little about these objects and do not know what to expect next."

An urgent appeal has gone out to astronomers to monitor the object which is now known as McNeil's nebula.

"We will lose it in about six weeks when Orion goes behind the Sun. We will then have to wait until the autumn for it to be observable again. I expect it will have changed by then," says Reipurth.

"I'm thrilled to have found it and to be a part of such a great effort," says McNeil.

Someone tell NASA ...

[the real darkskye]

To point hubble at the discovery for a real closer look.

-- Nothing more to say on the matter, mostly due to being 2 hours from finishing work and I need a new desktop background ;)

They already did ...

[the real darkskye]

Hubble images of M78 (The originating nebula from which this star is emerging) were NASA's Astronomy Picture Of the Day late last January and can be found here [nasa.gov]

Not a New Nebula

[brownpau]

Upon RTFAing, it's not a new nebula, it's a new star which has emerged from an existing nebula: M78, a diffuse nebula in Orion. [seds.org] Is 8x6 arc minutes a very large dimension? Our charts are going to need updating.

Re:Not a New Nebula

[barakn]

RT other FA. Its near M78. Until now the nebula was not visible, so you could call it a new nebula.

Re:Not a New Nebula

[brownpau]

>The new object had appeared alongside the well-known gas cloud known as Messier 78.
D'oh. I stand corrected.

Amateurs drive discovery

[jkmullins]

Many people don't realize that a very large percentage of new celestial bodies are discovered by amateur astronomers with only small scopes, or even no scopes at all. Professionals, when working professionally, tend to focus on particular spots in the sky, studying a single object to learn everything they can about it. Amateurs, on the other hand, look at objects all over the night sky, and are more likely to see an object not previously charted. These discoveries are then focused on by the professionals to pour over with the large scopes and do the big science on, but it's always nice to see an amateur get his/her due in the discovery of a new object.

Re:Amateurs drive discovery

[Tenfish]

There's three categories where most of these amateur discoveries usually happen. New comets, new asteroids, and measurements of variable stars. Sometimes amateurs will refine measurements of variable stars, or they will sometimes discover that a star is variable when it was previously not thought to be.

This one is really exciting because it's a discovery in a category where amateur discoveries are very rare.

Re:Amateurs drive discovery

[jafuser]

If anyone ever had a right to actually really name a star (and not just those "star registry" organizations), it'd be the guy who discovered this one...

Re:Amateurs drive discovery

[snake_dad]

This one is really exciting because it's a discovery in a category where amateur discoveries are very rare.

I'm not even sure that a professional astronomer has seen this before. Granted, I'm not an astronomer myself, just an enthousiast, but I've never heard of someone actually detecting a new star at its moment of birth... Has this ever been seen before? Or am I overestimating the significance of this?

Re:Amateurs drive discovery

[Tenfish]

No, it hasn't been seen before. Read the article.

Distributed All-Sky ReSurvey

[G4from128k]

This type of discovery highlights the potential value of a distributed effort to continuously resurvey the sky. If a group of amateurs agreed to take pictures of selected (preallocated) spots in the sky, and send in the pictures, then we could find the events like comets, asteroids, novae, variable stars, etc. on a more timely basis. An amateur network could even send out re-imaging instructions or multiple-telescope coverage instructions to help disambiguate faint signals or triangulate on in-system objects.

The effort could even use a SETI-like distributed process to have idle computers do the image-to-image registration and differencing needed to detect changes in the images of the sky. Each computer would have reference images of some part of the sky and send back a "hit list" of potentially interesting image elements. The hit list would drive future observations (or reobservations) and ultimately be broadcast to the professional community for more intensive study of new astonomical phenomena.