Light Echoes Solve Mystery of Tycho's Supernova 98
Ponca City, We love you writes "Powerful telescopes in Hawaii and Spain are using 'light echoes' from the original supernova explosion that have bounced off dust in the surrounding interstellar clouds to identify the precise type of supernova that Tycho Brahe saw 436 years ago. Although the echoed light from Tycho's supernova is around 20 billion times fainter than the original light observed in 1572, the team took identical images of the sky a few months apart and then digitally subtracted one from the other to find evidence for several sets of light echoes rippling across patches of dust in the northern Milky Way. 'Using light echoes in supernova remnants is time-travelling in a way, in that it allows us to go back hundreds of years to observe the first light from a supernova event. We got to relive a significant historical moment and see it as the famed astronomer Tycho Brahe did hundreds of years ago,' said Tomonori Usuda, of the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Tycho's original observations were particularly important as he immediately concluded that the new star, visible even by day, could not be closer than the Moon challenging the Aristotelian view of the cosmos, widely accepted since ancient times, which held that the sky beyond the Moon never changed."
I want to play. (Score:5, Funny)
That is really cool. Like some kind of galactic diff.
Tycho! (Score:1, Funny)
http://www.penny-arcade.com
Light echoes? (Score:1, Funny)
"Light echoes?" Is there something wrong with the word "reflections" now? Hmm, let me just check my light echo in the mirror..yep, still pretty.
Amazing work though, from my laymans perspective it seems incredible that they can get usable data in this way.
Reverse Ray Tracing (Score:5, Funny)
When can we point our telescopes at an object hundreds or thousands of lightyears distant, and pick up the light reflected back at us that previously traveled from Earth to that object, then reassemble it into images? Images of the Earth's past, twice as old as the lightyear distance of the object?
We could look at an object 1000 lightyears distant for reflections of Jesus being crucified. Search among objects 250-600 lightyears distant for reflections of people arriving in the "Americas" on ships before Columbus. 176ly distant objects could show us images of Newton getting hit by a falling apple.
Finally a use for the combined computing power of all Earth's computers.
Doubting Thomas (Score:2, Funny)
Scientific community: We don't believe you until we can see it ourselves. Neh!
Re:Light echoes? (Score:5, Funny)
HA-ha! You like semantics! /Nelson Muntz
Re:20 billion times fainter? (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, don't sugar-coat it, OK?