Mystery of an Ancient Super Nova Solved 96
Bob the Super Hamste writes "The BBC is reporting that the mystery of a supernova seen almost 2000 years ago has been solved. The supernova RCW 86 was observed in 185AD by Chinese astronomers and was visible for eight months. Recently scientists have wondered how the supernova grew so big. By combining data from the Chandra X-ray telescope and the XMM-Newton Observatory with recent images from NASA's Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey telescopes, scientists have figured out that the supernova expanded into a relatively empty bubble of space. These empty bubbles of space are typically associated with a core collapse supernova, but the core remnant is high in iron, which instead is associated with a type 1A supernova. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal."
So I guess it wasn't (Score:1)
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Huh. I have a PhD and can still recite the whole first trilogy. So I think you are unscientifically extrapolating from your personal experiences.
I hope by "first trilogy" you mean episodes 4-6... I'd hate to guess what that Ph.D is in if you mean 1-3.
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Not to mention AD goes before the year, not after it. AD 185 would have been correct, 185 AD is not.
And never, ever spell it Aluminium (Score:1)
If it's clear then they can use it. It's not like biology or chemistry, where the old term is a serious waste of brain space and thousands of things were named or numbered completely wrong in the first place, based on limited knowledge or overzealous use of bad Greek or something. It's a completely clear and simple synonym that you want to eliminate, I presume, solely for the sake of consiste
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Like sibling said - AD stands for the Latin Anno Domini, which in English comes out to: "In the Year of Our Lord"
That's also why AD goes in front of the date in traditional year designation (so that AD 2011 reads out: "In the Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand Eleven" )
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CE stands for Common Era, which is the preferred notation now a days. And BCE for the years before that.
Its also the wrong notation. Excellent arguments at the link below by Wilson, Delaney, Panikkar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era#Opposition [wikipedia.org]
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Damn straight ... On my calendar, it's October 25, 14,317,304,002.
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A real /.-er would use stardates. Negative integers if necessary, but stardates.
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which means if you roll the clock back, the universe was actually created on a Tuesday. Always felt the weekend was on the wrong days.
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Since dates and time frames are the subject, I'm just going to comment on your sig since it's tangentally related.
3.5GY - 4GY, not 3GY.
one link I found places life at, at least, 3.85GY.
http://books.google.com/books?id=csJlqn4BokIC&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=fossilized+bacterial+mounds+australia&source=bl&ots=Sdw9htUNHx&sig=kOTPe0YO_Y0snxGJ2XGnLaLQa_o&hl=en&ei=ThWoTvmhCfT5sQL33eHsDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=fal [google.com]
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Check this calendar proposal, I remember seeing it twenty years ago on Omni Magazine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tranquility_Calendar [wikipedia.org]
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Great, we cast away AD/BC system and KEEP the year numbering as that is an accumulative figure based on the passing of the seasons, etc... so unless Christianity was kind enough to provide us with our seasons back in the day, I think a year would still remain a year in this unholy atheistic world.
Now why would Christians stand in the way of science almost 1 for 1? That is truly worthy of debate.
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So you consider something as being "wrong" just because three people have some arguments against it? Not even that good arguments if you take a look, one uses a slippery slope fallacy and another one is about the feeling of non-Christians (it's debatable which of BCE/CE and BC/AD are more appropriate for non-Christians...)
Regardless of arguments and how good they are, it rubs me the wrong way your certainty "it's also the wrong notation", a more honest approach would be "there are opinions against it".
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Those aren't excellent arguments. They're silly. Oh noes, if we stop saying AD we're going to eventually change the whole calendar! Their arguments are at least silly. The Southern Baptist Church appears to be trying to convince people to USE CE:
"The Southern Baptist Convention has criticized the use of BCE and CE as being the result of "secularization, anti-supernaturalism, religious pluralism, and political correctness"
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Reading comprehension fail. Multiple times.
The first objection is religious, of course, and that's to be expected since the notation comes from religion. You've also completely flipped what the Southern Baptist Convention said. Reread that entire paragraph. Let's leave religious arguments of of this for a moment, however.
Most of the other objections are very similar. They don't say that we'll "eventually change the whole calendar." More accurately, the point is that changing to CE/BCE is a matter of r
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For a better analogy, it's like trying to substitute "Xmas" for "Christmas". The Christians take it as a direct attack on them (which it is, really), most everyone else thinks you're being petty, it never really catches on, and (not least importantly) the joke's on you really since you're still basing it off of the same Christian roots that you attempted to eradicate. X is the first letter in the Greek word for "Christ". Similarly, the "current era" is still based on the life of Christ. Change it from AD (A
Re:Use CE, Avoid AD to designate the years. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am as anti-religion as they come and I think the CE/BCE vs AD/BC thing is ridiculous and petty. If you aren't going to actually change the dates they represent there is no point in changing the letters. It's not like most people even know what AD stands for anymore than they know what AM and PM stand for. There are far more important battles to fight than this one.
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Like adoption of Dvorak?
while at this, let's overhaul "second"
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Some folks are trying to do just that. [wikipedia.org]
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Sure, but 9 192 631 770 Caesium transitions is not very handy, so that should be changed first.
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And to respond to myself...
If you want to change that then don't you think we should change the words for our days of the week? Unless you think Tyr, Woden, Thor, Frige, and Saturn are less religious based than Jesus.
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They is really completely arbitrary and subjective, though. I am sure that some people still worship the old Norse gods.
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I don't know about your friends... but apparently Norse god worship is also not uncommon among some groups of white supremacists.
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And the words for the months of the year.
January was named for the god Janus.
February was named for a roman festival of purification.
March was named for the god Mars.
April might have was named for the god Aphrodite.
May was named for the god Maia.
June was named for the god Juno.
July and onward are exceptions, being named after two people and the numbers 7-10.
Re:Use CE, Avoid AD to designate the years. (Score:4, Interesting)
July and August are not exceptions - They were named after Julius and Augustus as part of ceremonially making those Caesers gods after their deaths.
Squeezing them in moved the month numbered seven (September) to the ninth slot, October to tenth and so on.
There were some people who got as far as officially changing the week and month so that there were no ancient religious mentions involved. For example, they made the name of the hottest month Thermidore so as to give it a quite rational association and avoid naming months after deified Roman emperors in their new calender. This didn't stick, because they a. also instituted what was called 'The Reign of Terror", b. died violently within weeks of tampering with the calender, and c. went down in history as mostly first class jerks.
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Agreed. I've always seen it as less an attempt at a clinical dating system, and more of an attempt to sound arrogant (in spite of best intentions).
There are still alternate calendars out there, based on Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, and various other religions. Not too many calendars out there that aren't.
It does make an interesting thought exercise, though... If you're going to make it non-religious, from which point do you start counting up the years? Picking the absolute oldest city in existence won't do it,
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Duh... like any other revolutionary change to the way we've counted dates. Pick any time of arbitrary significance. Say... "now".
Now you just have to decide whether it was the beginning of year 0 or 1.
Then comes the hard part: getting people to switch. This works better when you bring an army.
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Mycroft
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We could just use the date of the appearance of the star reported in the bible as leading the wise men to Jesus. :)
Unix Years (Score:2)
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Take a celestial navigation course. It all makes sense.
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It's religious people who care. If you're religious but not Christian you may not want to pronounce Jesus as your lord every time you write a date. I'm not religious but I can certainly understand that sentiment, and it's easier if we all just use the same thing. So CE it is.
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Anyway, I never thought much about it, till I read a column by William Safire. He used to write a colu
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I am fairly religious and it just doesn't bother me. I do find the anti religion zelots a bit amusing. I am just waiting for them to demand that Maryland and San Francisco change their names because of separation of church and state.
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What does Maryland have to do with religion? I guess you could argue that her husband thought he derived his power from God but considering he lost his head over that argument I don't see how Henrietta Maria of France is related to religion.
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Well here we have a problem of History books. My history book said that Maryland was created as a refuge for Catholics so was given the name Maryland after Mary. So was it a home for Catholics named after the blessed virgin Mary or named af the a queen named after the blessed virgin Mary?
I am not catholic so if I in anyway did not show the proper respect when using Mary's title and place in reference to Roman Catholic belief it was purely caused by my ignorance and not out of any attempt to be disrespectful
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Quite possibly both are right. Unofficially named after the Mary that the Catholics worship, officially named after the Kings wife.
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"Quite possibly both are right. Unofficially named after the Mary that the Catholics worship, officially named after the Kings wife."
Who was named after the Mary that Catholics hold in high reverence.
I am pretty sure that most Catholics would say the worship God and revere Mary but again I am just guessing.
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I am pretty sure that most Catholics would say the worship God and revere Mary but again I am just guessing.
Actions speak louder then words and quite a few Catholics act as if they worship Mary. This isn't surprising as the Judea-Christian religions are severely lacking a female side to their God.
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I try to respect others beliefs so I am not going to say that a Catholic believes this or that . I can say that my faith doesn't believe in the saint system that the Catholic church does but I am in now way offended by a town named after a Saint.
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I'm religious, but your Lord is not my Lord, and I dispute your claim that your Lord is the one who "owns time". So instead of getting into a pissing contest over whose God gets to be the one running Time, how about we just agree to call it the "Current Era", and leave all the dates the same so we don't have to fuck around with changing calendars?
You might as well have said,
I'm religious, but your Lord is not my Lord, and I dispute your claim that your Lord is the one who "owns marriage". So instead of getting into a pissing contest over whose God gets to be the one running weddings, how about we just agree to call them "civil unions", and leave everything else the same so we don't have to fuck around with changing the rest of the laws and stuff?
I'm not going to argue with the sentiment (I've actually argued for that civil union point before), but i
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>observed in 185AD by Chinese astronomers and was visible for eight months
I'm pretty sure that the Chinese astronomers didn't use either system.
CET - Common Era Time? (Score:2)
Or, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE [wikipedia.org]
Abbreviations are a pain.
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You lot always wait too long to whine! Where were you when we transitioned from BC to AD? Do you know how hard it was to get people to start counting upwards?
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How about we just use +/- 0 (zero). Pick your point, all nicely metric like.
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Everyone pays the same, except for those who can afford to shuffle money out of (whatever your particular country is) to somewhere else, those who have disproportionately high or low profit margins, and anybody else with a some disparity between their actual situation and the particular number chosen for taxation.
The system (whatever your particular country is) has is a monster because it's the government's attempt to model real life in nice easy-to-compute numbers. Life is complex, and so are taxes.
The Star (Score:1)
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Probably not. Modern scholarship seems to mostly be of the opinion that any kind of notable star around 4 BCE (which is when we currently think Jesus might have been born) would most likely have been not a star at all, but a comet.
But in any event, the Clarke story by that name is fantastic.
Re:The Star (Score:4, Informative)
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A mythology is not something one should apply a truth value to, because when you do, you are missing the whole point ... I believe we have lost our collective identity due to misinterpretations of mythologies as literal and from secular pressure.
The "secular pressure" is solely in response to pressure from people who do believe in the myth as literal fact. If you want to interpret the story of Jesus' birth as a Jungian / Campbellian "social dream," that's fine, but that's not how most believers intepret it -- nor is there any reason to believe that they ever have, from the days of Peter and Paul to the present.
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A mythology is not something one should apply a truth value to, because when you do, you are missing the whole point.
Thankyou for perfectly describing the entire religion of Christianity. And most others, as well.
Now, if the followers would understand this, we would not be having "debates" about teaching "Intelligent Design" in schools, they would not feel that science is trying to disprove God, Evolution would not be controversial, and Catholics would be able to use birth control.
Sadly, that's not the case. As far as they are concerned, if it's not 100% down-to-earth solid fact, then it's a Lie. So you just called their
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Sadly, that's not the case. As far as they are concerned, if it's not 100% down-to-earth solid fact, then it's a Lie. So you just called their God a lie by implying that the facts disagree with their preconceived notions of Divinity and Reality.
Not at all. And in fact we can expect another solar deity with the same story within the next 500 years or so as these characters show up once an age, like clockwork. Jesus said his successor will be carrying jugs of water. Its not a joke, look at the procession of the equinoxes... "this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!"
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CE proponents don't have anything against agriculture (they're not advocating changing the calendar). In modern times CE was used by people who, for religious reasons, didn't want to refer to Jesus as their lord every time they wrote a date. Many people who are not religious kind of feel the same way.
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The CE thing has nothing to do with hating agriculture, that assertion is pretty odd, I don't know how you arrive at that conclusion. It's about getting away from referring to God every time you write a date, namely, Anno Domini and Before Christ.
Even many Christians don't believe Jesus was born on Dec 25. They often think of it is Jesus' birth observed. Besides, a star that lines up with the sun every year would contradict the story a bit. If it happened every year, the Magi wouldn't have had any reason
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Probably not. Modern scholarship seems to mostly be of the opinion that any kind of notable star around 4 BCE (which is when we currently think Jesus might have been born) would most likely have been not a star at all, but a comet.
Another different theory says that the "wise" men from the East were actually astrologers. The star or cosmic event was actually something on their astrology charts which told them about some significant event happening in Palestine. When you have Herod's court mentioning they didn't notice anything in the sky...it was nothing more than astrology being used.
Not giving it any more credence than any other theory...but whichever is true...Jesus was born about this time.
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Another different theory says that the "wise" men from the East were actually astrologers. The star or cosmic event was actually something on their astrology charts which told them about some significant event happening in Palestine. When you have Herod's court mentioning they didn't notice anything in the sky...it was nothing more than astrology being used.
So he's not the messiah, then, he's a very naughty boy?
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No core remnant in Type 1a (Score:3)
It probably should just say remnant. Type 1a supernova are the complete destruction of a white dwarf by nuclear fusion of a substantial portion of the white dwarf's mass, which does not leave behind a core.
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Indeed, TFA reads:
However, the case is not closed for RCW 86; these cavities are associated only with what are called core-collapse supernovas, but the Chandra and XMM-Newton observations show evidence of a great deal of iron in the remnant - associated instead with Type 1A supernovas.
The phrase in the /. summary, "...but the core remnant is high in iron..." appears to be the invention of the submitter, and does not appear in the original article.
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