[HN Gopher] Hubble's Hitchcock Moment: An Explosion in Unexpecte...
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Hubble's Hitchcock Moment: An Explosion in Unexpected Place
Author : wglb
Score : 31 points
Date : 2023-10-06 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scitechdaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scitechdaily.com)
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Test of a large-scale weapon in a relatively uninhabited region.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Perhaps Dyson Sphere maintenance window?
| lostmsu wrote:
| IMHO, somebody's Andromeda mission blew up in mid flight.
| nolta wrote:
| should link to the original source:
| https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023...
| rbanffy wrote:
| Thank you. This one looks like it was written by a human, or an
| AI on a reasonable compute budget.
| irrational wrote:
| > Such collisions produce a kilonova - an explosion 1,000 times
| more powerful than a standard supernova. However, one very
| speculative theory is that if one of the neutron stars is highly
| magnetized - a magnetar - it could greatly amplify the power of
| the explosion even further to 100 times the brightness of a
| normal supernova.
|
| Uh... maybe my reading comprehension is bad, but are "1,000" and
| "100" switched in this paragraph?
| elmomle wrote:
| I think brightness (being distributed over there surface area
| of a sphere) scales with the square root of energy released.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Different kinds of stellar explosions put different fractions
| of their output into visible light.
| darthoctopus wrote:
| Nope, you're not imagining things. The article actually quite
| wrong here: kilonovae are so named because they yield ~1000
| times the peak luminosity of classical novae (~1e8 Lsun vs ~1e5
| Lsun), not supernovae. For that matter, supernovae are
| themselves also named that way because their peak luminosities
| far exceed that of classical novae (with the most luminous
| recorded being >1e11 Lsun). I am not an expert on magnetar
| mergers in particular but according to the MNRAS paper that is
| cited, the transient in question, AT 2023fhn, gave a peak
| luminosity of about 4e8 Lsun (under certain assumptions about
| wavelength dependence, distance, etc) --- nowhere near
| supernova territory. Notably, the paper doesn't actually make
| the same claim about magnetars that the HN-posted article does.
| addaon wrote:
| Stars are ejected from galaxies all the time. Usually this causes
| no problems to experiment designs which assume that each galaxy
| acts as an isolated Petri dish, but sometimes a star is ejected
| with a planetary system capable of supporting life, and on a
| trajectory where it may interact with another galaxy during the
| stellar life time. In that case, of necessity, when the star
| enters the sterilization zone between galaxies it must be
| sterilized to preserve the validity of the Experiments.
| ordu wrote:
| _> reaching peak brightness and fading again in a matter of days,
| unlike supernovae which take weeks or months to dim._
|
| This phrase appears in the article four times. It is not the only
| phrase repeated multiple time. This is not the first article
| doing that, I see it regularly: you read the abstract and then
| 2-3 repetitions of the abstract with minor modifications adding
| exactly zero new information. It seems to me as a trend in the
| article writing to repeat something multiple times, with an
| average number of repetitions growing from year to year.
|
| It forces me to skim article instead of reading it thoroughly to
| seek something I didn't read yet.
|
| I wonder what makes writers to do it? Is it like in a school when
| you need to write a text with a specific lower bound for a word
| count?
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| AI likes to repeat phrases verbatim, just saying. Though the
| Occam razor tells me there might be SEO considerations that get
| proposed by plugins like Yoast SEO (key focus phrases and so
| on). Someone might have blindly accepted them.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It's most likely SEO mysticism. Like those awful blogspam
| articles: "This blog will tell you how to set up your WiFi
| router. Setting up your WiFi router can be easy, but only if
| you have a guide helping you to set up your WiFi router. The
| first step towards setting up your WiFi router is to turn the
| router on. You've just taken the first step towards setting
| up your WiFi router. The second step towards setting up your
| WiFi router is..."
|
| Guess which article now shows up towards the top of search
| results for "set up a WiFi router"?
| redundantly wrote:
| > Is it like in a school when you need to write a text with a
| specific lower bound for a word count?
|
| More text/article == More ad space
| lawlessone wrote:
| Maybe it was a normal supernova on star ejected straight at us at
| an extremely fast speed?
| cf100clunk wrote:
| The article is fascinating but seems to give no context for the
| use of Hitchcock's name in the title, so I'm going to just go
| ahead and suggest it is regarding the film director's calculated
| formula for suspense:
|
| https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5966-hitchcock-hoppe...
|
| or perhaps his differentiation between suspense and surprise:
|
| https://auralcrave.com/en/2018/08/01/what-is-suspense-the-de...
| irrational wrote:
| It is clearly a reference to Alfred Hitchcock and the Three
| Investigators. The explosion location is a mystery that will
| require the investigative power of three spunky teenagers
| working out of a junkyard to solve.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Afraid being too old, but what else? No other association comes
| up immediately for Hitchcock moment, a suspenseful moment in a
| film in his style :) And that matches the articles content for
| that observation here.. So: agreed! (if there is any doubt
| left).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Interesting, but a painful read, with parts that don't even make
| sense.
|
| > Such collisions produce a kilonova - an explosion 1,000 times
| more powerful than a standard supernova. However, one very
| speculative theory is that if one of the neutron stars is highly
| magnetized - a magnetar - it could greatly amplify the power of
| the explosion even further to 100 times the brightness of a
| normal supernova.
|
| So, if one is a magnetar, it greatly amplifies it to a thing 10x
| smaller than what it would normally be.
|
| I expect more from AIs.
| brennaw1 wrote:
| The cosmos are a stage
| wrycoder wrote:
| If your planetary system offends the Empire, this is what
| happens.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| By Superlaser or Invictus? I'm guessing the former since you
| used "the".
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