Astronomers Find Nascent Exploding Star, 'Rosetta Stone' of All Supernovas (gizmodo.com) 27
"A star located 60 million light years away went supernova last year, and astronomers managed to capture all stages of the stellar explosion using telescopes both on the ground and in space," reports Gizmodo.
Long-time Slashdot reader spaceman375 shared Gizmodo's report: This awesome display of astronomical power has yielded a dataset of unprecedented proportions, with independent observations gathered before, during, and after the explosion. It's providing a rare multifaceted view of a supernova during its earliest phase of destruction. The resulting data should vastly improve our understanding of the processes involved when stars go supernova, and possibly lead to an early warning system in which astronomers can predict the timing of such events.
"We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star," Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the leader of the investigation, explained in a press release. "This is a different situation, because we really know what's going on and we actually see the death in real time."
Of course, it took 60 million years for the light from this supernova to reach Earth, so it's not exactly happening in "real time," but you get what Foley is saying... Observations of circumstellar material in close proximity to the star were made by Hubble just hours after the explosion, which, wow. The star shed this material during the past year, offering a unique perspective of the various stages that occur just prior to a supernova explosion. "We rarely get to examine this very close-in circumstellar material since it is only visible for a very short time, and we usually don't start observing a supernova until at least a few days after the explosion," said Samaporn Tinyanont, the lead author of the paper, which is set for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. TESS managed to capture one image of the evolving system every 30 minutes, starting a few days before the explosion and ending several weeks afterward. Hubble joined in on the action a few hours after the explosion was first detected. Archival data dating back to the 1990s was also brought in for the analysis, resulting in an unprecedented multi-decade survey of a star on its way out...
In the press release, the researchers referred to SN 2020fqv as the "Rosetta Stone of supernovas," as the new observations could translate hidden or poorly understood signals into meaningful data.
Long-time Slashdot reader spaceman375 shared Gizmodo's report: This awesome display of astronomical power has yielded a dataset of unprecedented proportions, with independent observations gathered before, during, and after the explosion. It's providing a rare multifaceted view of a supernova during its earliest phase of destruction. The resulting data should vastly improve our understanding of the processes involved when stars go supernova, and possibly lead to an early warning system in which astronomers can predict the timing of such events.
"We used to talk about supernova work like we were crime scene investigators, where we would show up after the fact and try to figure out what happened to that star," Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the leader of the investigation, explained in a press release. "This is a different situation, because we really know what's going on and we actually see the death in real time."
Of course, it took 60 million years for the light from this supernova to reach Earth, so it's not exactly happening in "real time," but you get what Foley is saying... Observations of circumstellar material in close proximity to the star were made by Hubble just hours after the explosion, which, wow. The star shed this material during the past year, offering a unique perspective of the various stages that occur just prior to a supernova explosion. "We rarely get to examine this very close-in circumstellar material since it is only visible for a very short time, and we usually don't start observing a supernova until at least a few days after the explosion," said Samaporn Tinyanont, the lead author of the paper, which is set for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. TESS managed to capture one image of the evolving system every 30 minutes, starting a few days before the explosion and ending several weeks afterward. Hubble joined in on the action a few hours after the explosion was first detected. Archival data dating back to the 1990s was also brought in for the analysis, resulting in an unprecedented multi-decade survey of a star on its way out...
In the press release, the researchers referred to SN 2020fqv as the "Rosetta Stone of supernovas," as the new observations could translate hidden or poorly understood signals into meaningful data.
Re:In real time?? (Score:5, Informative)
Ryan Foley says : "we actually see the death in real time".
No. The death occurred 60 million years ago. What you see is the complete sequence of the death, the "before-during-and-after", but not in Real Time.
In Real Time, you might be able to influence this event, but it has already taken place, so you can't influence it, regardless of whatever definition of Simultaneity you might wish to use.
Nothing is ever in real time. Even when you play your favorite video game, there is still a time delay between the time something happens on the screen, your eyes receive the light, the light is focused onto the back of your eye, that image is processed in your brain and then registers with you.
Yes, that is pedantic. That is what you sound like.
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Relatively Pedantic (Score:3)
Nothing is ever in real time. Even when you play your favorite video game, there is still a time delay between the time something happens on the screen, your eyes receive the light
Actually, there is no real-time at a very fundamental level due to relativity. The events associated with the supernova will not occur at the same rate for us as they do for the star since the star's frame of reference is different from ours. This is far more fundamental than a propagation delay. In fact, two events at different points on the star's surface that are simultaneous in the star's frame will not be simultaneous in ours.
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It depends on what we means by "in real time". We are watching it happen at the same speed it happened originally, even if that was 60 million years ago.
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Re:In real time?? (Score:4, Insightful)
in that context, "60 million" is a measure of distance, not a measure of time.
Nothing moves faster than the speed of light, not even "NOW".
When you say, "if that was 60 million years ago"you imagine there was something like a universal NOW which is the same for everyone everywhere.
On earth and especially in the usually quite small circles of our daily life such a concept makes sense or even seems natural.
(i.e. 'At the very same time he was sitting at his computer, watching cuckold porn, his wife was allowing her bf to make her feel naughty.": Makes sense. They could send pics, talk, drive over and even when there are a few ms of lag we cannot notice that.)
The concept of 'universal now' starts to shows it's limits when you talk to someone on the moon (or listen to such a conversation on the radio as people my age did when the eagle had landed).
It is a rather cute and earthlingly notion to believe that behind the experiencible now of a supernova there is the 'real' now which connects us and that far away point of interest with limitless speed. But thats just an illusion the more ancient parts of our brain offers. That concept worked in the rain forrest but doesn't work once you look through hubble.
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Yeah. It's counter-intuitive. That's relativity.
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You know, anyone who read the summary pretty much got that.
Also, you couldn't do jack about a supernova happening even if you were present right next to it so you could experience it in real time. What exactly would you propose to do to influence a star going supernova?
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So do you. That it happened 60 million years ago isn't the point but that we're witnessing it and can test our hypotheses concerning supernovas by observing one in the making.
Re:In real time?? (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on how you choose to think about it.
According to General Relativity it's meaningless to speak of two remote events happening simultaneously, without also specifying the reference frame of the observer (their location and velocity). All (non-accelerating) reference frames are equally valid, and observers in different reference frames will disagree about the simultaneity of remote events.
Basically, "c" is something far more fundamental than the speed of light - it's the speed of causality. Light just happens to be one of many massless force-carrying particles that "travel" at that speed because they are instantaneous phenomenon: from the reference frame of a photon it jumps instantly from one atom to another, regardless of the distance between them. In fact, from the photon's perspective distance doesn't exist in its direction of "travel", having been subjected to infinite Lorentz contraction.
And from our reference frame, the explosion of that remote star happened simultaneously with our observation of it.
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Ryan Foley says : "we actually see the death in real time".
No. The death occurred 60 million years ago. What you see is the complete sequence of the death, the "before-during-and-after", but not in Real Time.
In Real Time, you might be able to influence this event, but it has already taken place, so you can't influence it, regardless of whatever definition of Simultaneity you might wish to use.
If I watch a recording of a hockey game I'm not actually seeing it in real time, the biggest consequence of that isn't whether I can affect the hockey game, but rather, if something truly extraordinary happened during the game I probably would have heard of it already. Ie, the consequences of that game have already affected my reality.
In other words we saw the supernova as it affected our reality [wikipedia.org].
Or, look at things a bit more literally, if I'm watching a recording I'm watching a simulation of time, events r
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Anything which isn't in your light cone is not in the absolute past. Spacetime is a single thing which we can only cleanly separate into spatially positioned timed events at very short distances. The speed of light in a vacuum is just a measure of how fast the concept of an absolute present breaks down across space.
It's annoying when people interject that some distant event happened millions of years ago, because it shows they've missed the whole point of relativity.
Last year� (Score:2)
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Exactly.
Early warning system? (Score:2)
Who is going to be warned?
"Early warning system"? (Score:4, Interesting)
If a star is going to go BOOM close enough to us to impact, there isn't anything an "early warning system" can do to help us.
I'd just as soon NOT know until it happens in that case.
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If a star is going to go BOOM close enough to us to impact, there isn't anything an "early warning system" can do to help us.
There is no point in an early warning system for Earth because there are no stars capable of going supernova within 100 lightyears which is considered the safe distance for a supernova. This is so that astronomers know which stars to watch so they can better identify and then study stars as they go supernova.
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