10-Year-Old Boy Discovers 600-Million-Year-Old Supernova 214
minty3 writes "Nathan Gray, 10, from Nova Scotia, Canada, recently discovered a 600-million-year-old supernova in the galaxy PGC 61330, which lies in the constellation of Draco – beating his sister by 33 days as the youngest person to find a supernova. Gray made the discovery on October 30 while looking at astronomical images taken by Dave Lane, who runs the Abbey Ridge Observatory (ARO) in Nova Scotia. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada confirmed Gray's discovery, but astronomers with the International Astronomical Union say they will need to use a larger telescope to make the finding official."
A great example for kids (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this gets shared widely in school science classes and among the home schooled.
Science is open to people of all ages.
Re: (Score:2)
Brother-sister hate (due to competition) now goes cosmic.
600 million yrs... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I hope this gets shared widely in school science classes and among the home schooled.
Science is open to people of all ages.
not going to happen. do you really think the government wants kids finding spy sats and posting info about it online? i recall an incident where a kid asked what the object he found was and then his place was raided and they took his computer and telescope.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A great example for kids (Score:5, Interesting)
In my experience most of the home-drooled kids get only a very basic bit of science because it's likely to interfere with the wacky creationist/survivalist ideas of their parents.
This is a vile stereotype that doesn't deserve to be propagated. I say this as a home-schooled person currently enrolled in a Computer Science Ph.D. program at a well known state university.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps you are more the exception than the rule here?
Re:A great example for kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. It is shown that home schooled and private school kids get a far higher education overall. Now the people that are interested in control whine that they dont get the proper exposure to liberal/conservative "values" but that is nothing but raging by the extremists on both sides. Parents do tend to cherry pick, but that flushes out when they hit college.
Re:A great example for kids (Score:5, Interesting)
It's only been reported that a higher percentage of people who are homeschooled graduate from college compared to their non-homeschooled counterparts (66.7% home schooled versus 57.5% non-homeschooled)(source: US News and World Report). Of course this only looks at homeschooled people who were accepted into college and does not take into account the entire homeschooled population. The statistics that pro-homeschool sites tout are the ones that have qualifiers in them like the us news statistic that only looked at homeschoolers that attend college. I haven't found the percentage of homeschool students that continue their education after high school equivalency.
It makes sense that homeschool do better than the overall population of public school. After all, only 2.9% (2009) of the school age children were home schooled. Their household tended to have both parents and at least one of them being a professional in a field and more than half of the homeschooled had a household income greater than $50,000/yr (2003). The traditional educational system is "burdened" by students with economic, mental or social disadvantages not found in large numbers in the homeschool population. If I limit the population of non-homeschooled students to similar demographics within the ed fast facts, I get close to the same completion percentages as the homeschooled population.
In other words: Homeschooling in of itself will not magically make you a better student. However if you were homeschooled then the odds are greater that you come from a two parent household that values an education which makes you more likely to succeed at least academically.
Re: (Score:2)
I think most people understand you can be intelligent coming out of home schooling, but that the relative lack of social interaction with peers has to hamper your interaction with others in the college atmosphere.
Re:A great example for kids (Score:5, Informative)
http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2012/03/homeschool-vs-public-school-statistics-infographic/ [writeathome.com]
Take a look at the info graph - yes it is sourced.
Re: (Score:2)
blog.writeathome.com
seems legit
Re: (Score:2)
CNN?? Or would you prefer Fox News instead.
Come on back when you mention a CREDIBLE news source because you mentioned an entertainment tv network. CNN has not had news on it for over a decade now.
Differences: The rate of public school students entering college after graduation has fluctuated between 62-67% in recent years. A variety of factors come into play which result in that relatively low matriculation rate. The drop out rate in public schools tends to have a negative effect on matriculation d
Re: (Score:2)
If it's on the Internet, it's true. Didn't you learn anything in public school?
Re:A great example for kids (Score:5, Informative)
Every graph you will find on the topic will show, in order of performance,
Public Schools
Private schools
Homeschools / Catholic schools (I forget which performs best)
If you really want to be lazy,
Good old wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling#Research [wikipedia.org]
This one is a goodie-- its in a peer reviewed journal, shows the full demographic breakdown, and indicates that 65% of homeschool families in 2007-2008 spent less than $900 on schooling (compared to the average $9000 /pupil in public schools)-- a full quarter spent only $200-400. It also indicates that in all tests the students on average achieved 84th and above percentile.
http://contentcat.fhsu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15732coll4/id/456 [fhsu.edu] (pick "Academic achievement and.....")
If you need more, you should really just google "homeschool achievement". This isnt even news, youre just trolling at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The socialization that occurs in public schools doesn't necessarily prepare students for the type of socialization they will experience in the adult world. In (too) many cases, students the socialization learned in public schools is actually detrimental and must be unlearned.
Also, it's not like home schooled children grow up in a bubble. From what I've seen and read, they usually participate in sports leagues, orchestra or marching band and other clubs.
The best public schools are probably better overall t
Re: (Score:3)
I think you are confusing self-directed post graduate study with the K-12 home schooling sometimes abused to keep kids away from mainstream curriculum. Not all home schooling is abused this way. But often enough that its a stereotype I'd hate to mark a kid with unless he/she was exceptional* in some way to demonstrate accomplishments beyond the mean.
*Yeah, I know. All our kids are above average.
Re: (Score:2)
Those "abused kids" score in the 85th percentile and cost 1/10th the average per-pupil rate in public schools.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet, when you talk with them, they still think the earth is 6000 years old and was made in 6 days.
So my question is: The 85th percentile of what?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I know a home-schooled person who's a grad student in computer science at a state university. He's a creationist and he insisted on his child being born in his apartment and not at the hospital. So I don't think being a wacky creationist/survivalist is mutually exclusive from being a grad student in computer science.
Re: (Score:2)
I know someone that has a PhD in physics, has made respectable contributions in various research projects of interest to both government and industry, last I knew was the chairman of a college physics department, and is a creationist. There is no contradiction there. Knowing and playing by the rules of football doesn't mean you can't know and play by the rules of basketball.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I think it varies greatly depending on the area. Here in Seattle the local school system is very supportive of the home school families, providing suggested curricula, phys ed classes, and making available space where the home-school students can socialize. In Louisiana, where my niece lives, pretty much all the home school families are ultra-conservative religious fanatics who think even the pitiful LA school system is too liberal. Dunno the situation in Nova Scotia.
Re: (Score:3)
> make up a disproportionate amount of those against public schooling
However you don't have to be against public schooling to be against sending your own kids to public schools in your area. I would wager many people who home school are in favor of public education, just not what is available to them.
My own sister does this, and isn't any sort of creationist or religious zealot. Instead she says things like "He can't be mainstreamed"; which I am still trying to decipher the meaning of, but I am sure has
Re: (Score:2)
The chapter title in some video game he was talking about was "Fratricide" and he was shocked I knew the word; and I was shocked he didn't know the story of Caine and Able, afterall, its only one of the most referenced stories in western litterature
I could have worked out what fratricide meant when I was 11 or 12, but until just now I wouldn't have been able to recall the story of Cain and Abel. I think I've read it before, and could recall some of it with your prompt, but I don't know the motive or any detail.
I think that's at least average, if not better, for someone who grew up in England. There are very few Bible stories most people are aware of: Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark, Nativity, Death of Jesus. Looking up "10 well known Bible stories" sugges
Re: (Score:2)
> I could have worked out what fratricide meant when I was 11 or 12,
And you just guessed his age within a year. :)
> but until just now I wouldn't have
> been able to recall the story of Cain and Abel. I think I've read it before, and could recall some of it
> with your prompt, but I don't know the motive or any detail.
While I have been an atheist since age 11, I did grow up Catholic and had to go to CCD (Catholic version of "sunday school"), and choose a private catholic high school over going to
Re: (Score:2)
While I have been an atheist since age 11, I did grow up Catholic and had to go to CCD (Catholic version of "sunday school")
Atheism was never really a choice for me, it was just the default. When I was very young religion was something boring some adults did, which my parents tolerated but never encouraged. It was never discussed at home, and at primary school there was probably more about Roman gods than the Christian one. The country's traditions have lots of Christian influences, but also pagan ones, and others from immigrants -- the vicar came to school sometimes, but we'd go to see the Diwali lights in the city, my schoo
Re: (Score:2)
Are you, in the original Hebrew, and guarantee that your preferred modern rendering accurately reproduces the implied vowel marks not present in the original texts? Of varied transliterations therefrom, any one is about as good as the others, so long as general meaning is conveyed (which, in this case, it apparently was).
Re: (Score:2)
> mistake he made is indefensible on an intellectual basis, and we all know it.
> A far more sensible defence would have been that when typing quickly all of us tend to misspell
> words
I go with the affirmative defence. Yes I did it, and I don't really give a shit either way. Unless you are a compiler, I have better things to do than worry about minor deviations in my spelling from the standards.
I worry about it about as much as a billionaire might worry if you told him "hey don't park there, its a
Re: (Score:2)
I just think prescriptive spelling is highly over-rated. A large section of "great literature" in the Western canon was written with extremely irregular spelling. Prior to the push for standardization to sell dictionaries, English in particular employed a far greater range of alternate spellings. William Shakespeare's name isn't even spelled consistently on contemporary editions, much less the words used --- yet, I wouldn't discount Shakespeare's literature as the work of a dunce because he (and his editors
Re: (Score:3)
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
Re: (Score:2)
Anecdotal Supporting Evidence:
I know two parents each homeschooling their kids. Both believe the universe is 6,000 years old. I highly doubt that the discovery of a "600 million year old" supernova will make it to them.
There's a few homeschoolers just trying to provide a better education to their kids, because public schools (can) suck, and because they can't afford private schools and stay-at-home-moms can participate in collectives. The rest? Absolute nutbags, afraid that their kids will learn about
Re: (Score:2)
same is true here, the information is easy to find, the majority of home schooled kids are not running around thinking the world is only 6K years old, its just those are the ones we see in the news.
Re: (Score:2)
Hence the word anecdotal to start my post.
My experience is 100% nutbag, 0% quality-education-providing parent.
Re: (Score:2)
The rest? Absolute nutbags, afraid that their kids will learn about Jonnhy's Two Dads instead of how Jesus ride a dinosaur. WRAA! Must. Defeat. Human. Secular. Agenda!
that changed the way the post came out, you started off with your anacdotal evidence, than said because of your evidence the above quote is true
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience, 100% of homeschoolers are nutbags. What else do you want me to say?
Re: (Score:2)
Approximately 86% of Americans are religious nut-bags [pewforum.org]. Appro
Re: (Score:2)
I guess I'm fooling myself. I've spoken to my daughter at length to determine what sort of levels of "magical teachings" she gets at public school, and I've been pleasantly surprised that - for the most part - that the answer has always been so low that I don't need to do much correction. There's certainly some noise in the signal, but nothing a little parental involvement can't squelch out. ...of course, I'm not in Oklahoma, so all bets are off there.
I've taught (and continue to teach) her to thi
Re: (Score:2)
Regardless of how old they believe the earth to be, statistics generally support that they will score far higher in math, reading, etc than the public or even privately schooled students.
Re: (Score:2)
Here, have some statistics.
http://contentcat.fhsu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15732coll4/id/456 [fhsu.edu]
Click the "Academic Achievement and...." link on the side.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
In my experience most of the home-drooled kids get only a very basic bit of science because it's likely to interfere with the wacky creationist/survivalist ideas of their parents.
I think a much bigger problem is that if you are a kid interested in science you might be labeled as a loser nerd by other kids.
Re: (Score:2)
And, has this changed in the last 30-50 years, and is it related to home-schooling?
The answer is, 'no' on both counts.
So I'm not sure what you're saying -- home schooling prevents bullying of nerds by taking other children out of the equation?
Re: (Score:2)
So I'm not sure what you're saying -- home schooling prevents bullying of nerds by taking other children out of the equation?
Yeah, it takes other kids out of the equation that are going to be detrimental to the learning experience. Home schooled kids still get to participate in science clubs, sport, music and other social activities.
Re: (Score:2)
Home schooled is better (Score:3)
From the Wikipedia article on Home Schooling:
This quote, with references, is cited among many studies that note essentially the same thing.
What's that? Did you say something about socialization? From the same article:
Re: (Score:2)
So is home-schooling better or do public schools suck? (Or both...)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The $500-$600 expenditure neglects the cost of having a stay-at-home parent not earning a paycheck in the time taken to homeschool kids. This is no problem for upper-middle-class couples where a single professional salary can support a nice household. People in the lower quintiles of income, however (who suffer most from the shoddy quality of public education), don't have a spare $20k/year in excess salary they can give up to raise the kids. Now, perhaps an ideal solution would be a national $30/hr minimum
Re: (Score:2)
The point you didn't make, but is related to your post is that due to economics, most people use the public school as baby sitters. The schools happily take on this role while at the same time comp
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe 2 hours a day from a *qualified instructor* --- again, the upper-income college graduate professionals can do that, but the career hotel maid who wants her kid to have greater opportunity in life than herself may be stuck, even teaching 5th-grade fractions and vocabulary. Not everyone has the background to not only understand concepts (across all fields of knowledge) at an elementary-school appropriate level, but actually be able to *teach* them (far less, provide the inspiring type of teaching that c
You're guessing (Score:3)
Home school children probably succeed more so because of parent involvement than homeschooling itself. Comparing home schooled children to all of public schools is disingenuous, the demographics won't even come close to aligning.
You're guessing.
We (scientists, that is) have two situations completely described, with strong objective evidence that one is better.
You (anonymous coward on the internet) suggest that it "might" be due to something that furthers your own beliefs.
Cite some studies or shut up. If you think "more studies need to happen", then that's a weak argument: since the original study included almost 12,000 test cases, you'll need a much larger study to show that your assertion is valid, but wasn't shown in the original
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You're either trolling or do not know many home schooled people. What you describe is a minuscule fraction of them.
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on where you are. Seattle? Great home school movement, plenty of support groups, lots of support from the public school system even. Louisiana? By all the gods you don't even want to talk to most of those people. My niece looked at home schooling her kids, since the public school system is so bad there, but just being Latina was enough to make the home school groups treat her like crap.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I went to public school but the bulk of any real education came from my father at home. He had me learning algebra and geometry in grade school, I was also experimenting in electronics and using a soldering iron (OH THE HORROR) at age 8. Learning the maths needed to figure out transistor gain, analog electronic circuit design and digital electronics. I knew Binary, Octal, Decimal, and Hexadecimal and could covert between them in my head at age 12.
And my father knew nothing at all about electronics and co
Re: (Score:3)
Well, in fairness, by the time someone has a PhD in CS they are so removed from things like code reviews it's not funny.
Some of the worst programmers I've met in my life had a Masters in CS. Some of them couldn't really program at all, which often made me wonder how the hell they'd gotten a Masters degree. Because they'd clearly never learned some of the stuff I'd have expected them to have learned in an undergraduate degree.
At a certain point, CS has nothing at all t
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Got you beat, 100% of the home schooled kids I know are completely normal well adjusted people with no wacky parents. I have a decent sampling, five from one family, three of which are attending university now, belong to the guy in the cubical next to me who insisted on home schooling because of the public school systems race to the bottom in terms of increasing class sizes combined with the no-one left behind mentality. He wanted to make sure his kids weren't getting pulled down because teachers in public school have to cater to the lowest common detonator. Which by the way is a huge issue because if you're stuck in a class with a bunch of morons, in most cases, you're stuck with them until you graduate high school, meaning they will always be pulling you and the rest of the class down.
That is why we homeschool.
One of the reasons that many people think homeschooled kids are "weird" is that homeschooled kids generally are not taught that they must always stay at the level of the other kids their age. So, when a 10 year old joins into a conversation with adults, and makes valid coherent points, public schooled kids and adults think it is 'weird'.
This ONN Today Now! interview [theonion.com] pretty well illistraits what is meant when people claim homeschooled kids are 'weird', 'socially awkward', or
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You do know that car *starts* at 55,000$ ?
He never mentioned her age, she might be 25 and I don't know many people that age that own cars that expensive
Re:A great example for kids (Score:4, Interesting)
Daddy lets you look at a slideshow, spot the magically appearing star. Boy genius!
Or, to convert it from an unsubtle put-down to a more accurate description, it's a straightforward example of something that astronomers have long pointed out: Despite being one of the hardest of "hard sciences", astronomy is a field that has always made good use of interested amateurs. This is yet another of thousands of examples.
The typical explanation is that astronomers do much of their work on high-powered equipment that can give them detailed, close-up views of things out there. This is valuable research, but has the problem that such equipment typically has a tiny field of view, so astronomers often miss interesting things that are outside their tiny fields of view. Astronomy needs people doing wider-angle work, comparing images from different times (and maybe different equipment), to spot interesting things. This is often best done by amateurs with lower-powered equipment. They can report their findings to the astronomers, who can aim their high-powered tools at the coordinates to get the details. Amateurs rarely get paid, but astronomers traditionally reward them by naming discoveries after them.
An interesting extension of this in the "Zooniverse" project, ake the "Galaxy Zoo". Look it up. What they do is take images from the petabytes of data supplied by the newer telescopes, show them to volunteers, and ask them to mark various kinds of "interesting" things in the photos. Each of their projects starts with a short training session showing you one or two examples of what they're looking for. Then you dive into a string of random images, marking them up, and sending them back to the project's computers. Currently, they have a set of details in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) for people to see and mark up.
This development is interesting partly because it's aimed at amateurs with no special equipment other than a personal computer. They've got very good response, from people who want to while away a few hours looking at pretty pictures of the sky and marking them up. Astronomers have said that their volunteers have led to a lot of interesting discoveries. One of the widely-recognized examples was "Hanny's Voorwerp" (look it up ;-), which was discovered by and named for a young woman who is a Dutch school teacher. It has led to several years of work by many astronomers trying to figure out what that thing is.
So, while mocking this kid might be satisfying, it's missing an important point about how some scientific fields actually work. He's probably good enough already to contribute to this effort. As are most of the readers of slashdot.
Big Bang (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, 10-year-old boy's FATHER finds supernova (Score:5, Insightful)
10-year-old boy gets credit for it.
Re: (Score:2)
10-year-old boy gets credit for it.
But America wants to believe that scientific discovery is gnosis (inspiration from on-high), and not due to intelligence, intense education, and a lot of hard work. Why fund scientists when a child can do their work? Science is HARD. Science takes long years of dedication. Science takes resources/funding.
Re:No, 10-year-old boy's FATHER finds supernova (Score:5, Funny)
I have trained OCR programs to recognize patterns. If they discover something from the data I give them, do I not take the credit?
Re:No, 10-year-old boy's FATHER finds supernova (Score:4, Funny)
All credit to Adam and Eve.
Re: (Score:2)
I was trying to make a joke.
I evidently failed.
Need Coffee (Score:4, Funny)
Read that as 10-Year-Old Supernova Discovers 600-Million-Year-Old Boy
Re: (Score:3)
Now THAT would be News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters
kids today (Score:3)
"You kids need to get away from the telescope and go outside to play!"
Re: (Score:2)
And get the hell off my lawn!
Re: (Score:3)
My mother always joked that she was the only mother in town that had to yell at her kid to stop reading and play outside. Of course, karma being what it is, I find myself trying to tell my oldest son to put his tablet computer down and play outside. I wonder what HIS kids won't want to put down when he tells them to go outside and play.
Very nice Nathan, now go take a bath (Score:3)
33 days (Score:3, Insightful)
"...beating his sister by 33 days as the youngest person to find a supernova."
If he's 33 days younger than his sister, their mom had a rough couple of months.
Ho-hum (Score:4, Funny)
"10-Year-Old Boy Discovers 600-Million-Year-Old Supernova" is a "Dog Bites Man" story. "600-Million-Year-Old Boy Discovers 10-Year-Old Supernova" would be serious real news. Wow!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
no. (Score:2)
Dave Lane, who runs the Abbey Ridge Observatory (ARO) in Nova Scotia took the pictures.
Dad (Paul Gray) set up the computer to align images.
Dad set up the program to flicker the images between two panels.
Dad gave daughter (in 2011) 52 images, she found a discrepancy on the 4th.
Dad gave son some more images this year, he found discrepancy the same way.
In both cases, Dad did the subsequent digging, comparing the data to known bursts, planetismals, etc. and declared what was found a nova.
It's wonderful that the
Re: (Score:2)
You know how mind-numbingly boring a lot of top-level experimental research is? Perhaps your perception of how "science happens" comes only from Hollywood montage scenes, where excited researchers go from "huh?" to world-changing discovery in 23 seconds of upbeat music and cutscenes of random equipment (totally inappropriate for the task, and hooked up nonsensically). In the real world, slogging through hours of busywork is how "science" gets done, with brief flashes of "highly intellectual" work in-between
Re: (Score:2)
amazing photography (Score:2)
"Hmmm, we're shooting for an article about finding a supernova...I know, point to it!"
"This this?...THERE IT IS!"
I cannot believe.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The 2011 story was about his sister, the more recent story (from today) was about him. And both mention the father as the one who really did the work.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Recently discovered almost 3 years ago (Score:5, Funny)
Published on Tue Jan 04 2011
Cool story. Not exactly recent, though.
That is because before publishing, all Slashdot news go through a rigorous fact-checking and quality assurance review, which can take months or years.
Re:Cue jealous 30-something /.ers (Score:5, Interesting)
So, mad props to this young man. Good on ya, kid.
Re: (Score:3)
Instead of being happy for him and his achievement, his sister will probably put boogers on his pillow. He's 10, he probably does that to her anyway.
And well she should! Stupid younger siblings, always getting the same privileges as the older sibling at a younger age because it "wouldn't be fair."
"Hey, Mom and Dad, can use the telescope to break a record for girls in science?
"Sure thing, dear."
"I wanna use it too!"
"Okay, you can go after your sister."
"But Mooooom, you wouldn't let me make any scientific discoveries until I was twelve!"
(Not that I have a grudge or anything!)