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Huge Star Explodes 168,000 Light Years Away, Tiny Brain Does Same Here
Hey, want to see what a star exploding looks like in 3-D? Of course you do, it's totally amazing. Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (that's what it's called) in Chile, have sent back zoom-lens images of supernova 1987A, which blew up 168,000 light-years away from earth and was first discovered in 1987. How we're able to see this event, that happened in the past, and was apparently visible to the naked eye 23 years ago, today, is one of those questions that hurts my brain to think about. Moving stuff is frozen in time by the incredible long distances in space? I guess? I don't know. But it's pretty like jellyfish in a Jaques Cousteau film.
If we jump into this supernova will we be able to run around within the last 23 years changing past events like that failure to yield ticket I got in 1991 or Burt Reynolds's facelift?
With a careful application of booze and compliments, you could become your own mistress.
And after you break up with yourself, you could refuse to take your own calls and drive by your own house late at night.
If I had a do-over, there would be some tough choices to make. I would have to find a way to have my son without my (then) husband.
A dixie cup and a turkey baster?
If that star had a life supporting planet in orbit around it, do you think they knew what hit them? Was there time to say "what the…?" I wonder.
Would they have sufficient time to run out and charge things to their credit cards knowing they would not have to pay and could die happily having stuck it to The Man?
Also- Dave, it would be awesome if you were an ironically named cheesemonger and were friends with an ice cream vendor named Cohn.
Who knew? God invented TIVO.
This can't hold a candle to SN 1987D.
That supernova in 1987 was Aldo Nova most likely.
is one of those questions that hurts my brain to think about
I find it very odd that, when presented with this situation, some people decide there's a supreme being orchestrating all this crap and others who think, "I am so glad that there are actually smart people in the world who understand how this stuff works…or barring that, are working very hard to understand how this stuff works."
are you talking about nick denton?
This is just the show intro for the new Space Opera on SyFy, The Days Of Our Lives.
Like sands that fell through the hourglass 168,000 light years ago, these…were the days of our lives.
Is it the light-years thing that you can't understand?
I assume you "get" that light (like sound) travels at a certain speed (e.g., when you turn on a flashlight, the light takes (a very short amount of) time to travel from the bulb to the wall. The distance that light would travel (if not interrupted by a wall, etc.) in 1 year = 1 light-year. Since the star is 168,000 light-years away (I don't know how they know that!), that is how long it took the light from the star explosion to reach our telescopes. The things we are seeing now happened 168,000 years ago. The explosion was so huge that it's taken 23 years for it to unfold (so far?). The article said that it took 10 years for the explosion to reach a dust ring around the star. Maybe this helps, or maybe I can't parse.
That's what I thought, too. But then how was it visible to the naked eye 23 years ago?
@captain: This sounds like the lunatic ravings of a man who does not love Jesus.
@resip: I assume that that's when (to us) it started exploding, or when we first noticed it. The 'naked eye' part, I'm not sure about. Maybe, at that point in the explosion, it was much brighter?
@neato: God's days are much longer than ours.
@captain: I'm with you–the explosion lasted at least 23 years and was first visible from earth 23 years ago. It seems perhaps counter-intuitive, but my guess is that earth-based telescopes "see" this at the same time as the naked eye, because the light reaches them at the same time. So, earth-based telescopes don't see far-off events earlier, they just see them better.
Oh shit, that second hit of acid is kicking in . . .
Yes, re: telescopes vs. naked eye; same image, only bigger.
Thanks, Captain. Yes, helps some. I was wondering if the distance meant that this event happened 168,000 years ago. It's also comforting to learn that the image that we see is in fact changing (but just very slowly?) over time, and not actually frozen still-though that's the way it looks. Because it is an event in progress that we're watching. Or, an event that was in progress 168,000 years ago.
Big explosions viewed from a distance take a long time! Think of it like watching real-time image of a tree growing. (Only the tree is a tree of DEATH AND DESTRUCTION)
Only time spent at DMV is longer.
@Dave: I'll go with 168,000-23=167,977 as the start time, as it took the light 168,000 to travel to earth but was first seeable 23 years ago.
@scroll: Please never mention DM* ever again. Please.
Ok, let me try it. Light travels at one fixed speed. The thing blew up. Light left it, traveling at its fixed speed for 168,000 years. It got here 23 years ago.
The "information" — brightness, color, shape — about the blowup is the information that the light left with and carried with it. So beginning 23 years ago, we could see the blowup as it was when it blew up, 168,000 years ago. I.e., we see that thing 168,000 years in the past.
And today we see it as it was 168,023 years ago. And because it was/is in the process of blowing up, it's changed in those 23 years only, as DeepO said, very slowly. Very slow explosion.
I live to serve, but you may thank me anyway.
Yes, but your last number should be 167,977 years ago, since the explosion started "more time ago" than where we are now.
I'm beginning to lose my laser-like clarity on this issue. The explosion started 168,000 years ago and its light got here in 1987, so the explosion is now 23 years older than it was in 1987 when we first saw it. Right? right? Bearing in mind that I flunked arithmetic in third grade and never recovered from it.
Oh, and CapFan and kneetoe were right about the naked eye business. The eye is a telescope only smaller so it can see only bright things.
Ok, bear with me, I will try to explain (by which I mean figure out) the whole 168,000 plus or minus 23 thing.
The star exploded! 168,000 years later it was perceptible from earth. That was in the year 1987. So, the explosion occurred 168,000 years plus 23 year ago, IF YOU ARE SOLVING FOR X WHERE X=YEARS TO 2010.
On the other hand, if you are looking at a picture of the explosion now, in 2010, the light you are looking at is also 168,000 years old, but it is coming from an explosion that is already 23 years in the making. So, the explosion occurred in 168,000 years minus 23 years, IF YOU ARE SOLVING FOR X WHERE X=THE BEGINNING OF THE EXPLOSION (1987).
So, 168,000 and 23 are two constants, we were solving for two different things, and everyone, praise the lord, is right.
Right?????????
During and immediately after the explosion, SETI picked up this transmission from 1987A:
"Skeet, skeet, skeet, skeet…. Ok, stop, don't touch me."
Here is an article that explains things a bit better, I think. Here is a page on the supernova itself.
The picture in the video is an artist's conception of the supernova. The actual "picture" from the VLT is not really a picture as we think of it, and probably isn't in a Pretty Picture form for mass consumption. The artist's conception does look like pictures Hubble has taken of the object over the years.
What you are seeing is a snapshot in time (let's say yesterday, at 4:00PM Eastern) of a stellar explosion that first started 23 years ago. I see people are already hung up on the 168 thousand light year thing. What that means is the light from the original explosion took about 168 thousand years to reach Earth. However, since we have no way of knowing about these events other than by seeing their light (strictly speaking not true in this case, but work with me), in our reference frame, for all intents and purposes this explosion started 23 years ago.
And it was bright, about 23 times brighter than the progenitor star was. It was visible to the naked eye if you happened to live in the Southern Hemisphere. And, because both the explosion and space are ginormous, it's still ongoing. The rings you see are (probably?) material that was ejected by the star a few thousand years ago being heated by the ultraviolet light from the explosion.
Everybody, thanks very much. This interesting and I do feel like I have a better grasp on it than I did yesterday. (Though it is disappointing to learn than the image is a recreation.)
Here's a movie! I don't know why Wikipedia doesn't include the caption when you link to an image, but: "A time sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images, taken in the 9 years from 1994 to 2003, showing the collision of the expanding supernova remnant with a ring of dense material ejected by the progenitor star 20,000 years before the supernova."
And here's a real image from Hubble, along with a description of the various parts of the supernova.
How nice of you, usernameguy. Thank you.