[HN Gopher] Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients o...
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Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th
1950 (2021)
Author : joebiden2
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-04-07 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| philsnow wrote:
| April 12th is also the anniversary of Yuri's night (1961)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri%27s_Night
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| cerenkov radiation from a fleet of starships hitting their warp
| drives?
| cozzyd wrote:
| [flagged]
| marstall wrote:
| is it alieans
| bee_rider wrote:
| Little did the scientists of the 50's know, they would actually
| be the subject of observations from some hyper advanced
| society. Their measurements, sure, but also their instruments,
| how they cooked their lunch, down to their very sneezes would
| be analyzed.
| intrasight wrote:
| I think it's a given that every human alive today will be
| extensively studied in the distant future. Each of us will be
| the subject or several PhDs. What is not certain is if those
| future researchers will be man or machine.
| ctoth wrote:
| It's never aliens!
|
| Until it is.
| khochesh_kushat wrote:
| Sometimes, even then, it isn't.
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| May I suggest a video titled "Over 700 Stars Mysteriously
| Vanished In The Last 70 Years, But Why?" by Anton Petrov?
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3xddkS4H80)
| twawaaay wrote:
| Ups. "Dark forest" comes to mind...
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| I'll check it out
| twawaaay wrote:
| Great. Here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't really know anything about astronomy but it is an
| interesting read. They are really hitting these old photos with a
| ton of brainpower. There seems to be quite a well developed
| science around the use of old photos and the things that can
| contaminate them.
|
| It is interesting because the folks who made these photos in the
| 50's were themselves scientists and existed in a society
| different from but of course pretty close to our own. I wonder if
| they thought of these photos as a record for posterity, or just
| an incidental work-product (I guess at least a little bit of the
| former, because some effort has been put into preserving them). I
| wonder what they imagined we'd do with them. I wonder what
| they'll do with our ancillary work-product in 70 years.
|
| It is pretty funny that we've got this giant worldwide network,
| and it is probably easier for us to combine observations from
| their datasets than it even was for them. They'd have to at least
| walk down the hallway if they wanted to borrow a "good" copy
| photo from a colleague.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > I wonder if they thought of these photos as a record for
| posterity, or just an incidental work-product
|
| Typically both. That's why the plates were carefully cataloged.
| It was not uncommon for plates to be exposed/developed and not
| actually be looked at by a researcher for months or years.
|
| It's not researchers were lazy but if they were doing a survey
| and have 100 plates it took time to get through them. A plate
| needs its provenance cataloged so when handed to a research
| assistant they've got the metadata needed to properly catalog
| the plate's contents. Even in the plate days researchers would
| do meta-surveys comparing plates they may have done with
| archived plates made years or decades prior.
|
| Lots of comets, asteroids, and other transient phenomena have
| been discovered because a researcher has been able to look at
| decades worth of exposures to some patch of sky.
|
| In the 90s I remember reading about a lot of
| universities/observatories digitizing their plates (then on CD-
| ROM) so they were more readily available to contemporary
| researchers.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It's not unusual to delve into the archives, so to say, to find
| precoveries, ie. old observations that confirm a later
| discovery that originally went unnoticed, and astronomers in
| the 50s were certainly aware of this.
| martinpw wrote:
| Since it is not obvious from the title, clarifying that this is
| astronomy related. Some more context:
|
| _Nine point sources appeared within half an hour on a region
| within ~ 10 arcmin of a red-sensitive photographic plate taken in
| April 1950 as part of the historic Palomar Sky Survey._
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(page generated 2023-04-07 23:00 UTC)