[HN Gopher] Astronomers Witness a Dying Star Reach Its Explosive...
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Astronomers Witness a Dying Star Reach Its Explosive End
Author : worldvoyageur
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-01-09 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (keckobservatory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (keckobservatory.org)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Where are the actual images? The animation
| https://player.vimeo.com/video/658748207?h=ce918acdf2&title=...
| is beautiful, but it is not what I came there for.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| They probably do not look so stunning yet and are more of a
| scientific value.
| LegitShady wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220107114736/https://iopscienc...
|
| images available with the actual paper here
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220107115445im_/https://cfn-li...
|
| pre explosion images
| awb wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| To OC: Skimming the paper, I think a lot of the "witnessing"
| is in the form of numerical data.
| sharkweek wrote:
| Two of my cousins (twins, as an anecdotal fun fact) are
| both astronomers. I remember one of them explaining to me
| how little of their job is actually looking at badass
| pictures of space objects but instead staring at numbers
| representing badass happenings in space.
|
| The fun part to me is when they explain what they're seeing
| in the numbers in layperson's terms. One of them published
| on evidence of "star theft" when two galaxies pass
| near/through one another, how the composition of some stars
| signal they once belonged to a different galaxy than their
| current home. Fascinating to think about cosmic events as
| large as two galaxies passing near/through one another.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Welcome to the Matrix, Neo.
| BluSyn wrote:
| Website got hugged to death?
|
| Archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220109194733/https://keckobser...
| mungoman2 wrote:
| If you want to get excited by this kind of thing, I can really
| recommend Big Bang by Simon Singh. It's a great intro and made me
| go from "meh" to "wow" about cosmological things.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| The Code Book by him is also very good. I guarantee it'll have
| you implementing your own classical ciphers :)
| gammarator wrote:
| Full paper is here:
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac3f3a
|
| (AAS journals are now completely open access, so no paywall.)
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Clickbait has infected astronomy it seems
| freeslave wrote:
| If the star is 120 million light-years away, does that mean this
| explosion actually happened 120 million years ago?
| pc86 wrote:
| Yes
| ehsankia wrote:
| Would the fact that space between here and there is
| stretching during that time impact that?
| asxd wrote:
| Always blows my mind that because light travels through space,
| you can literally see into the past. Imagine, way way down the
| line, eventually meeting a civilization from a far away planet,
| and they could potentially show you actual photographs of
| Pangaea.
| xwdv wrote:
| More than Pangea... if they mastered the ability to resolve
| vast distances they could show us the herds of dinosaurs
| roaming the world, and then their total extinction, a
| Timelapse of the rise of human civilization, ancient Egypt
| and the Roman Empire, if only we could truly meet a
| civilization way down the line, or perhaps they would come to
| meet us, given their obsession.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Perhaps if there is a large reflector in space somewhere,
| that light could be passing back by us today! If we had a
| large enough collector, we could create an image.
| tegeek wrote:
| Unfortunately, that is not possible. Earth isn't a star and
| not big enough to provide this much data even outside of our
| Solar System, let alone millions of light years away.
| tegeek wrote:
| From a philosophical point of view, an event happens at the
| point when observed by an observer. For us, Humans on earth,
| this supernova happens now and not 120 million years ago.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I think even philosophy can withstand knowing the speed of
| light and incorporating it into the framework of 'when things
| happened' so that it agrees with our understanding of the
| universe instead of not.
| boulos wrote:
| It's too bad the rendering didn't include timestamps. For
| example, is that a year of data in 25s of rendering, or the last
| few months?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's too bad the rendering didn't include timestamps. For
| example, is that a year of data in 25s of rendering, or the
| last few months?
|
| Per the OP:
|
| > However, this novel detection of bright radiation coming from
| a red supergiant in the final year before exploding suggests
| that at least some of these stars must undergo significant
| changes in their internal structure that then results in the
| tumultuous ejection of gas moments before they collapse.
|
| I think this is probably the period from 5s to 12s in the
| animation.
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