How to See a Supernova This Weekend From Your Backyard | Hacker News Reader

How to See a Supernova This Weekend From Your Backyard

wired.com

90 pointswicknicks32 comments

This supernova has been hyped lately but is not something a casual observer will find to be particularly exciting. It is best seen with a telescope and will appear as a faint dot of light. The brightness will be magnitude 10 or 11, or about 100 times fainter than what the unaided eye can see in dark skies far from city lights. For more information, see

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingbl...

http://washedoutastronomy.com/content/another-urban-supernov...

http://www.dailycalifornian.org/how-to-spot-new-supernova-in...

People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the nighttime sky, and we now have the technical means to discover lots of new things.

One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They automatically detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/).

One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale).

There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).

In a funny way it seems like Astronomy is catching up to particle physics. Once you add automation there becomes far to many data points to do anything but compare a model with outside events and look for discrepancy's that suggest either all models are wrong or one model is more accurate than other related models.

There's definitely a parallel in the data demands of, say, LHC and LSST.

Besides automation, another key thing is the element of time. It means there's scientific value in re-surveying the sky. Ever since gamma ray bursts, the time scale has been shrinking.

Hours, and 21 million years, after it happened.

Thanks for pointing this out. I've obviously not gotten my head around the concept of space-time and the article fails to mention this.

Also, http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/08/25/superno... is perhaps a more official story. They too don't mention that it's discovery was a few hours after it was possible to observe the explosion, not a few hours after the actual explosion.

"The PTF survey uses a robotic telescope mounted on the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in Southern California to scan the sky nightly. As soon as the observations are taken, the data travels more than 400 miles to NERSC via the National Science Foundation’s High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network and DOE’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet). At NERSC, computers running machine learning algorithms in the Real-time Transient Detection Pipeline scan through the data and identify events to follow up on. Within hours of identifying PTF 11kly, this automated system sent the coordinates to telescopes around the world for follow-up observations."

can it look like a planet-wide intelligence to an outsider? :) . Interesting to compare to the origins of cybernetics :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener#During_and_after...

It seems to me that detect-track-target feedback-looped principle was one of key in the development of intelligence of animals and humans, and it seems to continue its work in developing the intelligence beyond that.

These conversations are useless. Everyone knows that anything we see is strictly in the past and already has happened. Yet for practical purposes, a week ago there was no supernova there. Today a supernova is there.

It may help you to look at it like this: a supernova is NOT the star exploding, it is the observation of the star exploding. In one sense, this is wrong, but in another it is really the only freaking thing a supernova can be. Therefore since it wasn't a supernova until humanity saw it being a supernova, it is currently happening.

Further, the article only says the supernova is brightening, and that the telescope saw the star early in its explosion a few hours ago. From the reference point of observability, no claim is made that something 21million light years away is being watched now, just the effects of it are being watched right now.

Relax and go watch the show.

> Everyone knows that anything we see is strictly in the past and already has happened.

Actually, that statement is nonsensical. Choosing the Earth as your point of reference, the supernova is happening exactly when we see it happening.

I don't think it's nonsensical. There is a meaningful way in which it is in the past. Even if you turn yourself into photons, match positions with the supernova remnants, then return to physical form, the supernova is going to evolve though time for quite a ways beyond the current state we observe it in before your physical form has its rendezvous, even if the trip has zero duration for you.

Putting a specific time span on how far in the past it is without further specification is dubiously meaningful, saying it is in the past is not nonsensical. Everything we see is always in the past, even if it's just on the other side of the room.

If you set a reference point, then I think it's perfectly sensical to say two events happen simultaneously or "now," but without a set reference point those notions are completely nonsensical.

Most educated people understand the principle of relativity (which states that the laws of physics behave consistent in all frames of reference) and the fact that the speed of light is constant regardless of your frame of reference, but we tend to forget the resultant phenomenon called the relativity of simultaneity. Two observers in different frames of reference can't even agree on the order of events, much less the "exact time" they occurred.

Now, you can certainly propose the semantic axiom that "everything happened in the past due to the finiteness of the speed of light," but I find that axiom to be pretty useless in scientific discussion. You can suppose that millions of years of stuff has happened to that supernova after "now," but none of those events could have any causal effects on us.

> Two observers in different frames of reference can't even agree on the order of events

Please keep in mind that we and the supernova are more or less in the same frame of reference. So all the ambiguity of simultaneity does not apply here.

I fear you don't actually undestand several core concept of special relativity, among these past, present, causality and simultaneity. Of these, only the last one is relative to the reference frame. Temporal ordering of events is absolute for events that are causally related, if event A is in the past of event B, which is defined as event B being able to observe event A or any of its consequences, then event A happens before event B in every frame of reference. Only the time difference between A and B depends on the frame of reference (for an observer at rest relative to the microwave background, there are 21 million years between the supernova and our observation of it, but a neutrino emitted by the nova passes though the earth only moments after it was created in its own reference frame, as it travels almost at the speed of light relatie to the nova and the earth). Likewise, we say that B is in the future of A if B can observe A or any of its consequences.

Only in the case that neither A can observe B nor B can observe A, which we denote by saying that the events are in their relative present, the ordering becomes relative to the frame of refrence, but that case is irrelevant in the present discussion, as we can observe the nova and so have established the fact that it (or at least its beginning) is in our past. Note that its maximum, which is predicted to be observable around next friday, is in our present (we can not influence nor observe it yet), while our observation of it is in our future (we can still make plans for where to watch it), at least until next friday, when both of these events simultaneously move into our past.

fhars is correct. I'll say that you're getting closer than most people get to these concepts, but you seem to have mistaken partial ordering for no ordering. There is still a partial ordering of events, and we can now say that the supernova is in our past without ambiguity.

> Choosing the Earth as your point of reference, the supernova is happening exactly when we see it happening.

No, that is not true. You do not say point of reference, you say frame of reference - and for a good reason. Huge areas of space can all be in the same frame of reference.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_synchronisation

Yeah, I thought that was a little misleading also.

Why would you find it misleading to use our reference frame instead of the star's? There is no absolute "when" but a different time for each observer.

21 million years is not the point.

Not particularly exciting in the sense of being compared with Hollywood special effects. But I'm excited to look at it through my telescope and know that thing I'm looking at is a star exploding in a distant galaxy. And photons from that exploding star that have crossed 21 million light-years of intergalactic void are entering my eyeballs.

I hope you don't take offense to this but I laughed when I saw you're an attorney, because that is so poetic.

I was an astronomer first.

I always have to point this out at the risk of downvotes: it doesn't make sense to say that an event you're currently seeing on Earth "happened 21 million years ago."

Both space and time are relative, so if you're choosing Earth as your reference point, the supernova is happening right when you're seeing it.

No, you are confusing relative time, with transit time (i.e. the time it takes for the information to reach you).

Relative time is a real thing, certainly and messes with the idea of simultaneous.

But transit time is not that. We and the supernova are more or less in the same frame of reference (we are not accelerating relative to one another, and there isn't much relative velocity difference either).

And because of that it is correct to say it happened xxx years ago.

Is that correct? Let's say Bill was born here on Earth on August 26, 2011, "at the same time" astronomers first detected this supernova. On Earth, we observe Bill's birth and the beginning of the supernova to be simultaneous events. However, isn't it true that an observer at the supernova (presuming he could survive) wouldn't agree that Bill's birth and the supernova were simultaneous, would he?

He would because he knows how fast information travels.

> On Earth, we observe Bill's birth and the beginning of the supernova to be simultaneous events.

No, that is incorrect. We observe that the light from the supernova reached us now, yes. But we are well aware that it actually happened long ago.

Both us and the distant observer agree about the order and relative timing of the events.

It's only when we are not in the same frame of reference that we would disagree, and that is not the case here.

I don't know exactly where it belongs/fits in this discussion, but some of the remarks here remind me of the example I have used on occasion that you see lightening before you hear thunder because light and sound travel at different speeds even though they both originate with the same event.

Reading things like this always brings me back to the Fermi Paradox [1]. There are lots of stars in our galaxy. Our observation of many nearby planetary systems and our understanding of the chemistry of life suggests life should be relatively common but we've seen no evidence of it.

While life (on Earth) is at times incredibly resilient it's also really fragile. A supernova such as this must essentially sterilize space for light years around it and it bathes its neighbourhood in gamma radiation. Did this kill off some nascent civilization? Supernovas seem to be relatively rare (compared to the number of stars) but think: over billions of years what are the odds that such a thing--or something equally as deadly such as an asteroid or comet impact--won't happen?

Space in incomprehensibly vast. The energy required to travel to even the nearest star systems seems... prohibitive.

I'm inclined to think that there are also simply too many of us on this planet, a problem that we'll either correct or will be corrected for us as resources start to run out in the next century or two [2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Step 1: Move your backyard to the Northern Hemisphere.

Visually will the explosion appear any different than looking at a star with the naked eye?

At the moment, not really. In several hundred years it might become a nebula when it will look very different with a telescope. For example look up crab nebula.

Now I wish even more that I were back at school in Providence, the Brown observatory is open to the public. This would be a good humbling beginning to the school year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com