Hubble’s Hitchcock Moment: An Explosion in Unexpected Place | Hacker News Reader

Hubble’s Hitchcock Moment: An Explosion in Unexpected Place

scitechdaily.com

42 pointswglb27 comments

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.

Most of the article is copied wholesale from the official press release: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-finds-...

I'm not even sure how they managed to screw it up when the original makes sense

> Such collisions produce a kilonova – an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than a standard nova. 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.

They changed the nova in the first sentence to supernova making the whole thing meaningless. I'm not sure about the correctness of the supernova thing, but at least it is not inconsistent with the previous sentence.

> 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?

> 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

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.

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"?

“When I was a young lad growing up in the English countryside, my mother’s Homemade Apple Brown Betty was a constant salve to life’s many scrapes and scuffs - both emotional and physical. I remember the day my uncle passed, and her Homemade Apple Brown Betty was the glue that held us together. It’s quite a simple recipe, the Homemade Apple Brown Betty, so simple in fact that five pages of life story

Follow the directions for our Homemade Brown Betty (recipe link), substituting apple cinnamon for plain cinnamon.”

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...

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).

I mean a “Hitchcock moment” could also be a moment when you “prank” your cast and crew in ways that range from honestly funny to downright psychopathic. I know that’s not it, and he was a brilliant artist, and also a horrible person.

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.

Got it. Thanks, that had never been in my reading list but I'll check it out.

should link to the original source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023...

Thank you. This one looks like it was written by a human, or an AI on a reasonable compute budget.

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.

If your planetary system offends the Empire, this is what happens.

By Superlaser or Invictus? I'm guessing the former since you used "the".

Uh… maybe my reading comprehension is bad, but are “1,000” and “100” switched in this paragraph?

I think brightness (being distributed over there surface area of a sphere) scales with the square root of energy released.

Different kinds of stellar explosions put different fractions of their output into visible light.

Yes, but it says "it could greatly amplify the power of the explosion even further". So... 100x is even further than 1000x? Or, is it 1000x and then a further 100x (or 100,000x?)

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.

Maybe it was a normal supernova on star ejected straight at us at an extremely fast speed?

Test of a large-scale weapon in a relatively uninhabited region.

Perhaps Dyson Sphere maintenance window?

IMHO, somebody's Andromeda mission blew up in mid flight.

The cosmos are a stage

Reply on news.ycombinator.com