13 ms·
Astronomers witnessed the death of a star as it happened
- nicwolff 5y agoOr, about 60 million years after it happened...
- rootlocus 5y agoIt really is mindblowing when you think it actually happened 60 million years ago.
- Keyframe 5y agoWhat we're doing now might be visible as 'now' to someone 60 million years into the future, albeit a bit down the road from us.
- simonh 5y agoThere is a frame of reference in which the event and the observation are simultaneous.
- jb1991 5y agoI'm rather confused by this statement. Can you elaborate?
- eru 5y agoIf you move fast enough, weird things happen in special (or general) relativity. Similarly, if you somehow managed to send something even slightly faster than the speed of light, there's a frame of reference in which you have send it backwards in time.
- AgentME 5y agoThe photons we observed from the death of the star experienced no time between coming from the star and arriving to us.
- jb1991 5y agoAre you saying that if I’m in a spaceship, and I travel at the speed of light as I leave that star at that moment, and then I arrive here at earth, with my fellow photons traveling next to me, that I will have arrived at earth instantly without observing any time spent in transit?
- coremoff 5y agoThat is correct. Obviously, given that, you would have no way of stopping, so your arrival would be abrupt (ignoring whatever magical affects would be necessary to accelerate a massive object to light speed).
- jb1991 5y agoSo in other words, if you can travel at the speed of light, you can be anywhere in the universe instantly, and never have to wait to get anywhere? I will say, that certainly makes no sense to me.
- coremoff 5y agoit's a big "if"; it's not possible for objects with mass to accelerate to light speed. If you were able to do so, yes you could "get" anywhere in zero subjective time - as mentioned earlier, since no time passes for you, there would be no way for you to decide that you wanted to stop travelling at light speed - you would end your existence by impacting something. > that certainly makes no sense to me Humans, as a species, aren't experienced with relavitistic effects; we have no useful inherent intuition as to how things behave at these sorts of speeds. Most of us have to accept the maths and the experiements that demonstrate that our understanding of this behaviour is accurate.
- 5y ago
- amelius 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wteiuxyqtoM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wteiuxyqtoM
- junon 5y agoYes - when you're the star itself, I suppose. That's not what GP is suggesting at all...
- simonh 5y agoI don't think GP is really suggesting anything, just trying to make a clever comment with no substance.
- lostmsu 5y agoThis is definitely false according to SR, because the event is on the past light cone of the observation.
- tsimionescu 5y agoWell, from the perspective of the photons, the explosion happened just an instant before they hit the telescope, and they barely even travelled a single Planck length to get from the exploding star to the telescope. Events that are so far apart in space and time don't have fixed periods (or distances). To observers in other galaxies that are moving fast relative to both us and the star, the time between the explosion and our detection of it (were they able to perceive both) would also vary.
- LinuxBender 5y agoPerhaps one of their planets released a probe that will attach to a future intelligent life form and tell their story. [1] How many years until we potentially find it? [1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(episod...
- ASalazarMX 5y agoThat episode is great, but manipulating an unknown and unwilling alien brain always struck me as too dangerous. Maybe their Voyager equivalent reached the wrong aliens in the dark forest.
- LinuxBender 5y agoThe Enterprise crew agreed with you. They tried twice to sever the connection, nearly killing Captain Picard in the process.
- torstenvl 5y agoHeadline is a physical impossibility to occur (if we assume astronomers in our solar system), or a practical impossibility to know about (if we assume otherwise).
- imoverclocked 5y agoPedantically, we can't actually witness anything at the same moment it happens for the same reasons. Our brains trick us into thinking we are... but it turns out all of us are behind the times. I think the headline provides the necessary punch of what was so cool about this observation; "We" watched it evolve instead of just looking at the aftermath.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago>Pedantically, we can't actually witness anything at the same moment it happens for the same reasons. the best kind of antically, when I first read the title I snorted as everyone else and rushed in to observe the obvious (ironic given the subject) but your observation brought me up short - then again observations that are only milliseconds in remove from the occurrence as opposed to millions of light years may be given a pass about the 'same time' crack.
- lou1306 5y agoIt's not only the speed of light, but also the time the brain needs to process visual inputs, and It adds up to dozens of milliseconds: https://theconversation.com/what-youre-seeing-right-now-is-the-past-so-your-brain-is-predicting-the-present-131913 https://theconversation.com/what-youre-seeing-right-now-is-t...
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoIf only the brain used React and the shadow DOM we wouldn't have this problem!
- rootlocus 5y ago
- kfarr 5y agoIt referenced a time lapse in the article (once every 30 min) but I didn't see a video link. Did anyone else find it?
- dekerta 5y agoHere is all I could find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB2QQyEyF5k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB2QQyEyF5k The video description says that the timelapse was taken over the course of a year
- kosolam 5y agoI miss the images before and after
- prox 5y agoYeah, always the same. Also with archeological articles. Not a picture of the find :) That said, great article and discovery.
- yitchelle 5y agoThere should be millions of stars out there where death and birth of stars should be happening quite often. Why are we not seeing these? Is space just too big for us tiny human beings to observe them?
- jlawson 5y agoStars last a long time, so even though there are a lot of them, they don't die that often.
- mach1ne 5y agoSome sources claim that about one star per year in Milky Way dies. We have about 100 billion visible galaxies, so roughly 3000 stars per second die in our visible universe - however, most of those are small stars which aren't really visible to our instruments.
- goodcanadian 5y agoWe see supernovae regularly and observe the aftermath within days of the event. What is special about this one is that TESS happened to be observing it before the explosion.
- dmix 5y agoOfficial NASA press release https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/hubble-gives-unprecedented-early-view-of-a-doomed-stars-destruction/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/hubble-gives-unpre...
- mzs 5y agopaper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10742 https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10742 poster: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021tsc2.confE.144T/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021tsc2.confE.144T/abstra...
- modzu 5y agoahh I was hoping it was Betelgeuse