Amateur Astronomer Spots Supernova Right As It Begins

New submitter Rotten shares a report from Gizmodo: Amateur astronomer Victor Buso was testing his camera-telescope setup in Argentina back in September 2016, pointing his Newtonian telescope at a spiral galaxy called NGC613. He collected light from the galaxy for the next hour and a half, taking short exposures to keep out the Santa Fe city lights. When he looked at his images, he realized he'd captured a potential supernova -- an enormous flash of light an energy bursting off of a distant star. Buso took more data and informed Argentine observatories, who announced the outcome of their follow-up observations today: "the serendipitous discovery of a newly born, normal type IIb supernova," according to the paper published in Nature. Not only did this demonstrate the importance of amateur astronomy, but Buso's images also provided evidence of the brief initial shockwave from the supernova, a phenomenon that telescopes rarely capture, since they'd have to be looking at the exact right place in the sky at the right time. Buso didn't just discover a supernova, though. He also presented evidence for the "long-sought shock-breakout phase," as the scientists write, an explosion of energy theorized to emanate from a shock wave at the supernova's source. The researchers point out that it's hard to generalize from a single supernova.

Don't leave us in suspense! 4 and a half WHAT!?

[wierd_w]

Seriously, I know editing is hard and all, but can you please tell us-- Is this 4 and a half days, 4 and a half weeks, 4 and a half months, or 4 and a half years?

Re:

[wierd_w]

Nevermind-- I misread. Tiny assed phone displays, messin' with my myopia.

I see it is one and half hours. Meh.

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[Hal_Porter]

Don't mod up parent! Defend the honour of slashdot.org's wise and honourable volunteer moderators.

Who do sterling work in, often difficult circumstances.

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[Rakarra]

Looks like your wikipedia link got cut off. Here is the actual article on Andromeda. [wikipedia.org]
Other than that, perfect post.

This is why I read Slashdot

[FormOfActionBanana]

"light an energy" should read, "light and energy" but what's a /. submission without an error introduced by the editor.

Thanks for the nerd news. This made my day.

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[FormOfActionBanana]

This is also why I read slashdot :)

Re:That's what she said

[Chrisq]

She called me a human super-nova

Yes, one bang and you're finished

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[tigersha]

If his supernova goes bang close to her she is pretty much finished too

This should be looked into

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it even legal for ordinary citizens to snoop the skies like this? What if they happen to see something that, for the security of the public, should be kept secret? What if they were terrorists? It's time to put a stop to this, the safety of our children is at stake!

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[umghhh]

And some of the HW used in this has shockingly phallic shapes which is not what we want in our (through stupidity) enlightened times.

Re:This should be looked into

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Is it even legal for ordinary citizens to snoop the skies like this?

The copyrights to the sky are owned and licensed by the Disney Corporation.

If you are looking at the sky without proper DRM, you are a pirate and will be shutdown by the MPAA using their FBI lackeys.

Re: This should be looked into

[alienmole]

I always use a VPN when looking at the sky.

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[Calydor]

Your suggestion would lead to the equivalent of blurry Big Foot pictures of maybe-it-was astronomical phenomenon.

Re: Why donâ(TM)t we watch everything?

[nick13245]

The sky is huge. Most supernovas we survive are going to be very far away and are not very bright from our point of view. Therefore you need a big telescope to collect enough light to see them. The bigger the telescope is, the more of a minimum magnification level youâ(TM)ll have. There for youâ(TM)ll only be able to see a small fraction of a percentage of the sky at a time. Projects that survey the entire sky (e.g. those that look for asteroids) can take several months with just one telescope. Most large ground based telescope installations are dedicated to various research projects, usually studying one area of the sky. Not all of them can operate all the time due to weather. Until we have a large array of telescopes in space, itâ(TM)s unlikely weâ(TM)ll be able to constantly monitor the entire sky at any magnitude level enough to catch one off events like this. So therefore, amateur astronomy is still important.

Re:Why donâ(TM)t we watch everything?

[stevelinton]

There are a number of projects out there to develop specialised telescopes that will be able to take quite high resolution photos of unprecedentedly large areas of the sky at once, and big enough to gather enough light to show reasonably faint objects without needing too long an exposure. Look at the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, for instance https://www.lsst.org/ [lsst.org]. This aims to photograph all of the "available" sky (it's in Chile, so it never sees the stars around the North celestial pole) every few nights for 10 years. There's lots of infomation on their site and in their papers, but a few numbers that jumped out at me: 8.4m primary mirror, 3.2 GPixel camera, 15 TB of data each night!

Even this would have to get moderately lucky to see a supernova as young as this one, which was captured in it's first minutes or hours. It would also, ideally, need to identify what it was seeing almost instantly, so that it (or another telescope) could start a follow-up within seconds or minutes.

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[rogoshen1]

in the history of astronomy, how many amazing things were discovered by 'amateurs' ?

Re:Why dont we watch everything?

[edi_guy]

The cost is not that prohibitive, the technology is already there. It's just what society deems important. In the US we deem 1.) entitlements - $1.5 trillion and 2.) war $600 billion) as our two biggest priorities. Perhaps followed by 3.) spending beyond our means - $310 billion in interest.

NASA's budget is $20 billion.

Have an idea

[Provocateur]

Can we call it Buso Nova?

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[Chrisq]

Can we call it Buso Nova?

Why? I assume there is a joke here. Can you explain it.

I think it's a pun on bossa nova [wikipedia.org].

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[sconeu]

Only if we can blame it on the Buso Nova...

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the closest star is 4.5 light years away, and this was supposedly a "distant star" I'd say he didn't capture it as it began. That explosion is hundreds or thousands or more years old, done and over. He saw the initial effects as they reached Earth maybe.

No. That space-time event "happened" when it reached earth. That's how spacetime works: it's all in where you stand.

Time doesn't really have meaning without space because you're just doing matrix transformations on distance measurements between points.

He saw it as it began.

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[stevelinton]

DIfferent observers would calculate different lengths of time (and distances in space) between the sun going dark and the last light from the Sun passing the Earth.
In relativity, none of these observers is "special". All their calculations are equally correct. What they would agree on is the speed that that the light from the Sun was travelling at. So some might see the light taking 1 second to travel 300 000 km from the Sun to the Earth, others would see it taking about 8 minutes to travel 150 000 000 km (

Wait... neutrinos...

[SeattleLawGuy]

I vaguely remember astrophysicists being excited about neutrino detectors detecting supernovas before you see the explosion, because the neutrinos generated at the center of a supernova had so little mass that they made it through the star's densely packed matter much more quickly than the rest of the energy transmission. Yes, here it is... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re:Wait... neutrinos...

[jfdavis668]

Yes, if the supernova is close enough that the increase in neutrinos is recognizable. The problem is, it doesn't give a very good direction. Basically somewhere off to the right. Someone at the detector also has to check the data before they can even determine the direction. Telescopes start searching for the supernova, but may take a few days to check all the galaxies in that direction before they find it. This guy had before and after images in his 1 1/2 hours of data.

Question

[NicknameUnavailable]

I'm no expert in astronomy or digital image processing - but isn't there a technique for combining multiple lower resolution telescope images into a single high resolution image which is really reliable? What would the feasibility of taking a million of these tiny telescopes rigged with stepper motors for positioning to create a single virtual super-large aperture telescope? Would it be cheaper than the current best ground-based telescopes on the scale of ~100m in total cost?

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[jfdavis668]

Short answer, no. You would not get the angular resolution required unless you synchronize the data feeds. This is done to sub wavelengths of light. The reason is because the air moves. Its why they tend to be on high mountains, above as much air as possible. You have to have precise measurements to factor it out. They do build interferometers that work this way, but they have tunnels connecting them that are either vacuums or controlled environments. You would have to wait hours to days after a person ente

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[stevelinton]

You can combine multiple mirrors within a single telescope, but you have to keep them aligned to enormous accuracy (50nm or so) so you still need a massive framework.

You can combine multiple telescopes by actually steering the incoming light to a meeting point and interfering it, but it's incredibly hard to do. Everything needs to be super stable.

You can't get (much) more detail by combining multiple digital images. You can get a bigger image, or a "deeper" image (one that shows fainter objects) but not a

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[chuckugly]

Depends literally on your point of view I reckon.

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[stevelinton]

This is about the details of how the explosion happens. A star is a pretty big thing and it does not all explode at once. The explosion starts pretty far in and has to somehow get through or past the outer layers of the star before we can see it. The details of how that happens are very unclear.