[ExI] excellent! a nearby 1a has been found, before peak brightness!

[spike]

An exploding star had been sighted in M82, one of the nearest big galaxies.
The "supernova" a "Type Ia" -- the kind that led to the Nobel-worthy
discovery of dark energy..

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/24/opinion/urry-exploding-supernova/index.html?hp
t=hp_c3

 

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2014 10:02 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] excellent! a nearby 1a has been found, before peak
brightness!

 

That is cool. Even cooler would be when Betelgeuse goes supernova, and that
could happen tomorrow or in a million years and it's only 643 light years
away verses 11,400,000 for this one. Of course Betelgeuse wouldn't be a Type
1a supernova but a core collapse Type 2.  Cooler still will be when Eta
Carinea blows up, it's 7500 light years away but when it blows it will
probably be a photon pair instability style Hypernova. That would really be
something to see!

 John K Clark





 

John, this is all giving me some very pleasant nostalgia from when I was
less than half the age I am now.  It caused me to marvel at how much things
have changed since then.

 

What were you doing in 1987?  What was the big event of that year?  Do you
have specific memories?  I sure do.  We had a close-by type II irregular, in
late February 1987.  It was the biiiiig deeeealll that year for those of us
who were into that sort of thing, but some things were very different back
then.  I remember specifics about it: my astronomy buddy called me with a
breathless report of a nearby biggie, and we were going to have a meeting of
the astronomy club at the usual place over at the public library.  My young
friends, back in those benighted times, a chat group had to literally
"travel" to a common geographical "location."  Chat required use of physical
"vocal cords" and face-to-meat-face contact.  It was horrifying.  Actually
it wasn't that bad.  We enjoyed each other's physical presence.  We met.
The usual suspects at those meeting were about a couple dozen guys, but that
evening we had about 50, and our meeting room wasn't big enough, so the
librarian came by and opened the main library for us.  It was too cold and
windy, but guys were milling about in the parking lot, talking supernovae.
So fun!

 

We went about reviewing the mechanisms behind the various types of SNe.  For
several weeks I scrounged around for everything I could find, magazines,
books, anything we could get our hands on.

 

Tuesday evening I hear of the type 1a, discovered well before peak
brightness.  I marvel at hooooowwww muuuuch stuuuuufff has been discovered
since 1987, and how easy it is to get to it.  We know waaaay more now than
we did then.  In 1987, we treated the carbon/oxygen interface as a sphere,
but since then, 3D turbulence modelling has explained why the 1a seems to
detonate slightly before it reaches the Chandrasekhar Limit, by about 1%,
and why the explosions usually appear asymmetrical.  All this stuff we can
now find online, all of it free, such good high quality information, oh my.
Is this a great time, or what?

 

All this has a point beyond the pleasant memories of an exciting time 27 yrs
ago.

 

Using these flighty information-browsing techniques most of us have
developed, I was able to review and find more and absorb more and better
information in two exciting evenings than I did in several weeks back in
1987.  We had to go get scholarly articles, collect books (most of which
were outdated or written incompetently), we brought in a physics lecturer
from Cal-Tech (Murray Gell-Mann came out to remote little Ridgecrest
California!  Oh that was cool.  What a guy!)  But it was all so slow.  I
think I was studying for about a month, learning the details on the various
types of supernovae.  Now we can do it all so quickly.

 

Other examples of contrast between now and pre-internet please?  What does
this mean for the future of humanity?  

 

spike

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