Last night, or 11.4 million years ago, a star exploded in galaxy M82. These photos are about a month apart.
I’m looking at that and thinking, “I bet it was warm there.”
It’s expected to get brighter over the next few weeks, to the point where it might be possible to see it with your home telescope or even a pair of binoculars. Over eleven million light years away, and the supernova is going to be faintly visible from my yard.
Revise my earlier sentiment: I bet it was really warm there.
“Was” is of course the operative word here. I’d be willing to bet that it was really warm there – 11.4 million years ago. Time travel, this is how it works! Then again, it may be almost as cold out there now as Morris is today (does it get that cold in deep space?).
I think it’s -very- cool that we live in the future.
We three kings…
I don’t want to go this time. You take the myrrh.
+++
For some reason, this post – photograph, fact of newly exploding star, 11+ million lightyears… – makes me dizzy with… some happy feeling. The universe is active, and I live in it, and it has me in it, and exploding stars and vast distances. Wait, can that possibly be awe and wonder tickling at my heartstrings??
Thank you, star-watchers!
Here’s how warm it was: if the sun were to go supernova, the intensity of light at this distance would be more than that from the Hiroshima bomb going off. If the bomb went off while pressed against your eyeball.
(Stolen from a recent xkcd.)
Am I the only one really hoping for a Betelgeuse supernova in my lifetime? Preferably hitting peak magnitude around this time of year. I know the odds are slim, but they’re better than winning the lottery, right?
We could use a little bit of that warmth here. My car door locks froze up so I had to crawl in through the back hatch. Much amusement for the folks in the office looking out their windows.
We should be glad that there are supernovas, they’re probably the source of all the elements beyond Hydrogen and Helium, including the ground below our feet and us too. Weird thinking that all this stuff was up in the millions of degrees at one time.
WOW!
we’re all going to die
I would doubt it. I know I keep looking up at it egging it on thinking it might be teasing me and have already blown up hundreds of years ago.
So that’s another part of god’s creation gone then. One wonders what went wrong.
Nothing makes you feel small like being able to see an unimaginably large explosion from 11.4 million light years away. Reminds me of one of my favorite XKCD What If’s. A great quote from it – “The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they’re bigger than that.”
@#6, gussnarp: I too join you in wondering when Betelgeuse will go. Not sure if I would look forward to it. Will it not get warmer here with a second sun in the sky?
Not “gone” as such, just … radically redistributed.
Something something “mysterious ways” something, innit?
@13 marcoli
From my limited understanding, we wouldn’t feel it’s warmth, but it would be clearly visible during the day and probably the brightest thing in the sky at night – the moon included. I stand ready to be corrected.
george gonzalez @7:
Ordinary nuclear fusion can create elements up to iron, although supernovae account for the abundance of some of the lighter elements, and maybe half of the heavier ones.
Pete Newell @14:
The Cosmos is Socialist!
Just think, 11.5 million years ago, our ancestors were enjoying a perfictly nice Pliocene day and in another galaxy, intellegent life was shortly to be wiped out.
@BDC- Yeah, but anything about the super nova?
Doesn’t sound like I’m too far off the mark based on this
Great. Another thing for AGW denialists to blame climate change on.
I love the light-year unit measure, because it tells you how far and how long ago at the same time.
The star went supernova 11,000,000 years ago and it is (11×10^6) * (2.9×10^8) = 3.29×10^15 metres [2.1×10^12 miles] away!
This is a joy literal followers of bibble deny themselves.
Comment 12 kindly provides the link. And there it says:
Got that? Press a billion Hiroshima bombs against your eyeball which is much bigger on the outside than on the inside, and you get the experience of watching a supernova from one astronomical unit away.
Wonderful. Full of wonder, utterly wonderful – the event itself, and the fact that we on this vanishingly tiny scrap of dust can observe and measure a huge cosmic event that happened millions of years before our prehistoric ancestors existed. (doesn’t sound quite as nice as “wonderful”, but I think we get to call this “mind-boggling” too :-) )
Smoking on a rubber cigar…
Wow. Just…wow. Awe and wonder indeed. For some reason it’s given me a more dynamic picture of what our galaxy is, not just rotating in a grand dance, but occasionally exploding too (yes, I know the 11.5 Mly is well outside our galaxy, but I can picture a galaxy in my head, I can’t picture 11.5 Mly, so the mental picture I form is of a galaxy in an active, moving sense).
I’ve been hoping for Betelgeuse to go since I heard it was possible. If it went in the last 600 years, then I’ll have a reasonable chance of seeing it. That’d be way cool. It’s awesome to think that it’s both close enough to be daylight-visible, and far enough away that LIGHT will take 640 years to get here.
Awe and wonder.
“I bet it was really warm there.”
It ain’t the heat, its the humidity.
…supernovas…probably the source of all the elements beyond Hydrogen and Helium…
“Source” as in, how all those higher elements get out from inside the starts where they’re created.
The SN at magnitude below 12 is already visible even in a small amateur telescope. How small depends on good/bad your light pollution is.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far (at least for human understanding) away …
That’s no sun exploding … that’s Alderaan!
In 744 a red cross was seen in the sky from the UK which was probably a planetary nebula like this http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/balick/WFPC2/n6537.jpeg
I wonder if Beetlejuice will go off like that first?
I love being reminded that looking up at night means that I am looking into the past :) the idea fills me with such a sense of awe and happiness that nothing else can match.
george gonzalez @7: Correcting my #16, looks like you’re right. I didn’t know the heavier (than H, He) elements probably originally came from first generation supernovae.
And all because they were too arrogant to believe that a single seat fighter could shoot a torpedo into a shaft not much smaller than a womp-rat a long time ago in a galaxy 11.4m light years away.
oops, Alex beat me to it!
M82? Isn’t that the name of a firecracker?
It’s the name of a band almost as good as M83.
woggler @11
I know, right? God only sends the occasional hurricane to punish us for having non-reproductive sex on this planet. What the hell were those folks doing to warrant blowing up their whole star.
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
Yes, but what does that have to do with supernovae?
Isn’t lithium believed to have begun with the Big Bang?
Something to do with the fact that it doesn’t show up in regular fusion processes or supernovae.
I remember someone saying that Lithium was almost certainly created in the BB, but I can’t remember for certain whether they said **all** of our current Li was created then. From what I remember, there was more recent creation of Li, but I don’t know the pathway, so don’t consider this reliable in any way.
I might look it up later if I have any time online available to me.
According to wikipedia, Li is created through stellar nucleosynthesis, but the energy required to fuse Li is less than that to fuse H, so it gets burned as soon as it gets created. There will always be a small amount floating around, but our Li is primarily from decay from 7Be and 10Be and from particle fusion in the solar wind through chance high energy collisions that don’t have high odds of subsequent hi energy collisions on the part of the Li products.
7Li and 6Li are both highly stable, but 7Li is more stable than 6Li, it appears. unless it is simply generated much more frequently as 7Li makes up 92.5% of natural Li.
Snoof @39: It’s a bitter pill, apparently.
re Raging Bee @27:
WRONG! Fusion in a star can ONLY create elements up to the mass of Iron (Fe). When a star creates Fe, it results in (nearly) instant death of the star. Only the energy released during a supernova can fuse Fe into heavier elements.
Not to imply anything, but I was always amused by the coincidence of God being defeated by iron chariots. But Iron is a death poison to stars (of any mass).
No, there’s the S-process as well.
“The star went supernova 11,000,000 years ago and it is (11×10^6) * (2.9×10^8) = 3.29×10^15 metres [2.1×10^12 miles] away!”
Not really. While you have the general idea correct you have left out a couple of rather important items
from your calculation. Your above approximations contain some rounding and other numerical errors but
I will mostly ignore those here since those errors are relatively minor (e.g. to 2 digits of accuracy C=3.0e8)
and the Hubble expansion rate is currently only known to within approximately 15% (65 km/sec/Mpc, with
further revisions being highly likely).
1. The universe is expanding. Hence the light that was emitted 11e6 years ago show where the star was
at that time. Thus it *was* about 3.4e15 meters distant from Earth. However, the light from that star is
red shifted, indicating movement away from Earth at about 203 km/s, so at our present time that star is
physically *much* farther away than your simple calculation indicates, since we are seeing where it was
over 11 million years ago and it has moved a great distance farther away since then. The movement over
an 11.4e6 year time frame is about 7.3e19 meters farther away in fact. Notice that the change in distance
totally swamps the approximate 3.4e15 meters, by more than 4 orders of magnitude.
This is why the age of the visible universe is about 13.8e9 years while the diameter, based on a constant
Hubble expansion rate is about 92e9 LY. If we ignore the Hubble expansion rate, the estimated diameter
would only be about 2 * 13.8e9 LY or about 28e9 LY. Some further measurements have placed the total
size of the universe at greater than or equal to 250 times that 92e9 LY diameter, suggesting that it may be
infinite. The 92e9 LY diameter refers to only the visible portion of the universe while the 250X larger value
includes those parts of the universe that are not visible.
2. A further complication is that the Hubble expansion rate of the universe is actually increasing rather than
remaining constant. Hence the calculation of distances is somewhat more difficult than the above examples
would indicate.
But the initial calculation was wrong. Ball park: 10^7 (ly) x 10^16 (m in ly) = 10^23 m, for the initial distance.
Your delta of about 10^20 m is OK, so the change in distance due to expansion is about 3 orders of magnitude less than the initial distance.
I love being reminded of the wonders in the rest of the universe like this. I mean, I get bogged down in Earthly matters like marriage equality and women’s rights to their own bodies and music and TV shows and sometimes the vastness and awesomosity (yeah, I know dotted red underline, that’s not a word) of the universe gets mixed into the background noise.
Then things like this get posted, and I just get gobsmacked. 11.4 million years ago. And we (the human race) caught it within the last month. And some folks will be able to see it with binoculars. Not a powerful telescope — binoculars. “Boom” is a great description of what this kind of information does to me.
Has anyone come across which area of the sky someone in southeastern Pennsylvania should look with a 300mm telephoto lens to try to capture some of it? If it might be at all possible here.
ajb47 @47: This is a lousy picture, but M82 is in the upper right quadrant, and you should be able to find The Big Dipper in Pennsylvania :)
http://sci.esa.int/science-e-media/img/c4/heic0801h410.jpg
The Bad Astronomer recently did a lengthy exposition on why we shouldn’t be waiting for Betelgeuse to supernova, instead we should be looking to SBW1. Yeah, not nearly as good a name, but much more likely to pop in our lifetimes.