Catch a Falling Star

Ok… A dying star. Here’s the before and after shot (images from the NASA Swift team):

An the amazing thing is that they were able to watch and record the events in real time! The galaxy hosting the explosion was already under study because of an earlier supernova. This is wonderful, of course, and a big deal is made in various news articles about how great it is that this is the first time that a supernovae event was caught in real time from an earlier hint from an X-ray emission signature… Except that it seems that it isn’t!!! I do find it a tad annoying/puzzling that in a few seconds I was able to find pretty much the same sort of news announcement from two years ago. Does the press think that the members of general public are stupid, or have no memory? (I don’t yet have time to re-read both articles carefully, so I imagine this is maybe much better (it is rather closer), and there were more telescopes recording, and maybe from earlier, in a wider spectrum, and so forth, but not to mention the earlier event at all, as though a big news story was not made of it back then, is strange. (Perhaps the finding was discredited?) I did a blog post mentioning it entitled “When Stars Go Bang”, and you can link from there to a BBC news article for example of the coverage.)

Anyway, back to the excitement. We must not take away from the joy of discovery: From a NYT article* by Dennis Overbye:

Alicia Soderberg, a Princeton astronomer who had been using the NASA satellite to study the fading remains of a previous supernova explosion, received the startling results of that observation by e-mail while giving a talk in Michigan. Recognizing that this was something extraordinary, she sounded a worldwide alert.

In the following hours and days, as most of the big telescopes on Earth, and the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory watched from space, the star erupted into cataclysmic explosion known as a supernova, lighting up its galaxy and delighting astronomers who had never been able to catch an exploding star before it exploded.

“We caught the whole thing on tape, so to speak,” Dr. Soderberg said in an interview. “I truly won the astronomy lottery. A star in the galaxy exploded right in front of my eyes.”

More from Dennis Overbye in the New York Times, and from Maggie Fox in Reuters.

Just to get you thinking a bit more about this… a new black hole could have formed after this explosion as well (if the star was big enough).

-cvj

*Thanks Mia!