SN 1006 | Hacker News Reader

SN 1006

en.wikipedia.org

66 pointslukas11 comments

> While SN 1006 did not appear to have such significant effects, a signal of its eruption can be found in nitrate deposits in Antarctic ice.

Not heard about this, are there any other signs from supernova we have detected on Earth?

While it's not an exact parallel, core collapse supernovas unleash large amounts of neutrinos. These are detectable on Earth even before the light from the supernova explosion reaches us. This was the case with SN 1987a, where about 2-3 hours before the visible light reached Earth, neutrinos from the event were detected [0].

In the intervening years, we've actually build a "network" of neutrino observatories that cooperate and share event data, called SNEWS (SuperNova Early Warning System) [1], that will (hopefully) give us a little warning before the next major supernova event.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A#Neutrino_emissions

[1] http://snews.bnl.gov/

How come the neutrinos can reach us before the light does? I thought that neutrinos traveled at the speed of light?

Sorry if this is a stupid question.

This is answered here: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/90708/neutrinos-a...

> How come the neutrinos can reach us before the light does? I thought that neutrinos traveled at the speed of light?

The neutrinos are, I would assume, emitted before the light is.

More to the point, the neutrinos don't interact with anything on the way out of the star. They are generated at the core an leave at c. The light is a product of the shock wave reaching the surface, which happens a long time later, basically because the speed of sound in any reasonable medium is a lot less than the speed of light.

My first thought was "I wonder what it looks like". It looks like this: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/tapestr...

The article mentions that the event was possibly recorded in the form of petroglyphs[1]. I think that's a fascinating idea, and it reminded me of Dr. Anthony Peratt's[2] research on the recording of prehistoric auroral events, also in the form of petroglyphs[3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006#cite_note-napetro-5

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Peratt

[3] http://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003c...

IIRC, Carl Sagan's Cosmos has a scene of this event from the monks' perspective.

There's a mention of SN 1054: http://youtu.be/FBzZ-DPHd3Y?t=38m26s

> The Chinese astrologer Zhou Keming

In the midst of all this wonderful astrology I couldn't help but laugh. Didn't know that Keming was an actual name, brilliant.

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