Astronomers Have Found the Stars Responsible For an Explosion Recorded By Korean Astronomers in 1437 AD (theatlantic.com) 39
An anonymous reader shares a report: On the night of March 11, 1437 A.D., in what is now modern-day Seoul, a new star appeared in the sky, seemingly out of nowhere. The newcomer shone for 14 days before fading into the darkness. Korean astronomers noted the mysterious star and its brief stint in the sky in their records. Centuries later, modern astronomers studying these records determined that what the Koreans had seen was a cosmic explosion called a nova. Novae occur in two-star systems, when a dead star, known as a white dwarf, starts eating away at its companion, a star like our sun. The white dwarf slowly builds a layer of hydrogen stolen from the other star over tens of thousands of years, and then ejects it all at once, producing an eruption of light 300,000 times brighter than the sun that can last for weeks. Michael Shara and his researcher colleagues have spent the last nearly 30 years looking for the star responsible for this nova. In a new paper published Wednesday in Nature, they say they've finally found it. "It's been like searching for a needle in a billion haystacks," Shara said. For most of their search, Shara, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's department of astrophysics; Richard Stephenson, a historian of ancient astronomical records at Durham University; and Mike Bode, an astrophysicist at Liverpool John Moores University, focused on a part of the sky where they suspected the mystery star must lurk. The investigation was an on-again, off-again effort of "failure after failure after failure," one that they returned to when they had the time or a lead. Last year, Shara found some relevant files in his office that he hadn't looked at in nearly a decade, and decided to expand the search area in the sky. He started combing through digital databases of stars, looking for any interesting targets. In one astronomical catalog, he saw a well-known planetary nebula, a glowing shell of gas and dust. In a different catalog, he found an image of a binary star taken in 2016 in the same area. Then it hit him: That wasn't a planetary nebula. It was the leftover shell of a nova explosion, floating near the star system that produced it.
Likely cause (Score:5, Funny)
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Little Kim is a big ball of burring gas...
Pumba, with you everything is gas...
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It's even more important than that!
Interesting the only record is in Korea (Score:4, Interesting)
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Interesting the only record is in Korea
I wondered about how there's no record from Europe, but it turns out that the southern part of Scorpius where it appeared is apparently not very well visible from Europe. The declination is -43 degrees.
Re:Interesting the only record is in Korea (Score:5, Informative)
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The statement that in order to implement his program of maritime discovery, Prince Henry of Portugal (1394—1460) had founded at Sagres in the early fifteenth century a nautical school to which he attracted experts in astronomy, navigation and cartography, has appeared in recent works published in connection with the quincentenary of Columbus' first voyage. The assertion has already for long been the subject of heated controversy among Portuguese historians of which the best and most authoritative have amassed respectable evidence to show that no such institution ever existed. [tandfonline.com]
Or are you referring to some other institution?
I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's short story... (Score:5, Interesting)
...whenever I read about a nova and how people perceived it in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_%28Clarke_short_story%29
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I thought it was weird that he'd post a link to such a famous, easy-to-find story.
Thank you.
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I thought it was weird that he'd post a link to such a famous, easy-to-find story.
I found it weird that Wikipedia didn't mentioned what collection to find the short story. Then again, Arthur C. Clarke is no Ray Bradbury and didn't write that many short stories.
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There's definitely a problem here.
Re:I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's short story. (Score:4, Funny)
For which readers of Arthur C. Clarke are grateful.
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arXiv pre-print of the paper here (Score:2, Informative)
Only the abstract of the paper and a few figures are included at the Nature link (unless you pay $199 for an annual subscription, of course).
A pre-print of the paper, including the figures and full captions, is at arXiv here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00086 [arxiv.org]
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Of course you can get the actual published version using SciHub and its DOI: 10.1038/nature23644
Cool stuff! (Score:2)
A thought occurrs (Score:2)
Make one mistake... (Score:2)
So what do we get from this? (Score:1)
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Re:So what do we get from this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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It validates that those observers, at that time, were accurately describing events. Thus anything else that they mention now has more credibility. Maybe they wrote about things at the same time that were not astronomy related, like politics or other technology. They might be considered more authoritative now, bumping another idea out.
Re:So what do we get from this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Shara found that the star system responsible for the nova in 1437 A.D. shows dwarf novae in photos from the 1930s and 1940s, which supports his claim that both phenomena originate from a single source.
So: confirmation of an idea about how this system might work, shows that novae and dwarf novae are closely related.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] :^)