You Can't Hide from a Supernova

[Eaquae Legit]

Also Known As the return of the interesting Astronomy thread.

The Leonids are expected to be strong this year (yay!!). Peak will be on 18 November.

Get your binoculars out, folks! (It'll rain again here. It always does. Every single time.)

[Oliver Dale]

Great thread title. And me loves the Leonids. I have fond memories from my undergraduate years. That is, when it didn't rain.

[Epi]

I always miss every single good meteor shower thanks to clouds. Hopefully I can see this one... I wonder if I should go home and get my telescope and bring it to school? Hmm.

[hive_king]

*covers eyes* if I can't see the supernova, it can't see me.

[anonshadow]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/scien ... nted=print

Puffy, puffy planets. They would float in water!

[Eaquae Legit]

I just thought to check my star forecasts, and it seems like if you want to go planet-gazing this month, Saturn's your only hope.

[Eaquae Legit]

I'm mega-bumping this, because I got a rumour that Betelgeuse (in Orion) is about to supernova! Wow!

Sadly, this is an exaggerated rumour, with not much concrete behind it. So don't be suckered. But you can still hope it happens in our lifetimes!

[locke]

why isn't there a star called mark twain? The news of Beatlegeuse's death have been greatly exaggerated.

[neo-dragon]

It funny how people say it's "about to blow" even through if we were to see it happen today it means that it actually went nova like 600 years ago. It's odd to think about observing something that may have ceased to exist centuries ago. Astronomy is neat that way. It's the closest thing to time travel we'll ever have.

[Rei]

That is one of the things I love about astronomy. The idea of space-time becomes more real when you realise that we are looking through the depths of time when we gaze upon the stars.

[megxers]

EEE, speaking of very early stars, I can't wait for the James Webb Telescope. 2014!!!!

I am taking a class this summer that is apparently co-taught by one of my favorite astronomers and I am already freaking out about how awesome it will be.

[Eaquae Legit]

Man, you know you're a nerd when you have a favourite astronomer...














Mine is Sir Patrick Moore.

[Rei]

Sir Patrick Moore is amazing

[megxers]

Heh, mine's definitely not as famous as him. But in the specialty I'm most interested, he's one of the go-to people for it, so I look forward to asking lots and lots of questions. He's okay with it because he will walk with people to their next classes to talk with them about astronomy.

What is everyone's favorite astronomical sub-topic? Mine's exoplanets & trans-Neptunian objects. Does anyone else love GalaxyZoo? I want to do the galaxy merger simulation scoring one but my computer wasn't handling it well.

[Eaquae Legit]

I don't know GalaxyZoo but I know I want to know, now. I think if I had to pick an academic topic it would maybe be stellar lifecycles, but most of what I do is read internet articles and enjoy nighttime observing. I have a soft spot for Saturn, and seeing it is like saying hi to an old friend.

[megxers]

Oooh, nice choice on the stellar lifecycles! Also, I had never really been a huge fan of Saturn before, but the Cassini images are swaying me. A lot

[Eaquae Legit]

I developed this soft spot for it when I had to do an observing project for a class. We were tracking the movement of Titan, and it was the first non-terran moon I'd ever seen outside of pictures. It was an amazing feeling! And just to put the icing on the guiness cake, Saturn was tilted so we got a brilliant view of its rings! I've loved it ever since.

[Mich]

I know we've talked about him before, but reading threads like this makes me read every post in a specific voice, and it says hello with "Greetings, star gazers!"

[Rei]

When I was younger, Saturn was my favourite planet. But then I read a book about Lewis and Narnia, and a good point was made, quoting Lewis, that this past century has been overly fascinated with Saturn and that we should seek to be Jovial instead.

I still think Saturn is very pretty, but it is something to consider.

[Eaquae Legit]

:p This is the astronomy thread, not the cosmology thread.

[jotabe]

:p This is the astronomy thread, not the cosmology thread.

It could be worse. Others mistake astronomy with astrology.

[Oliver Dale]

:p This is the astronomy thread, not the cosmology thread.

It could be worse. Others mistake astronomy with astrology.

When I was an undergrad, people used to always refer to me as a student of astrology. It used to piss me off to no end.

[Satya]

My favorite planets: Venus and Mars. But that's only because of Sailor Moon... Um.. Yeah.

[jotabe]

My favorite planets: Venus and Mars. But that's only because of Sailor Moon... Um.. Yeah.

Well, at least you didn't chose the best one, who is obviously Mercury. >.>

@Ollie: well, that's way worse than when people thought i was going to study "physical education" XD lol

[Eaquae Legit]

:p This is the astronomy thread, not the cosmology thread.

It could be worse. Others mistake astronomy with astrology.

When I was an undergrad, people used to always refer to me as a student of astrology. It used to piss me off to no end.

The student newspaper once referred to the telescope owned by the School of Astrology.

[Eaquae Legit]

Double post, because hey, why not make this useful? Both Saturn and Mars are visible shortly after sunset right now, Saturn just to the south of SW in Virgo, and Mars WSW in Leo. Venus is also visible, WNW, in Gemini.

Pluto is also rising in the East, for anyone with a wicked awesome telescope (can I come visit your observatory, if you have one?).

http://www.neave.com/planetarium/ can show you a map based on your own location.

[Oliver Dale]

There's an app for that.

[Eaquae Legit]

I haven't been able to figure out how much of that is a joke, so thhbbbbppptt to you.

*plain old cellphone carrier*

[Psudo]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/scien ... nted=print

Puffy, puffy planets. They would float in water!

Another quote from that article:

While gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn are primarily hydrogen and helium, they also possess rocky cores

Rocky cores inside gas giants? I thought that was still speculation. Was that proven and I missed it, or did a fact-checker miss a point?

[jotabe]

Rocky cores inside gas giants? I thought that was still speculation. Was that proven and I missed it, or did a fact-checker miss a point?

It's more of an educated guess than a simple speculation. When it comes to gas, you need way more mass than big-J has to make it collapse into a sphere... and then you'd have at least a brown dwarf. It's assumed that Jupiter has a metallic core over which the gas blown out from the Sun collapse into a star began to accumulate by gravity.

[Dr. Mobius]

It's the closest thing to time travel we'll ever have.

Aside from gravity or traveling really really fast, anyway. It's likely to be the closest thing to reverse time travel, though. Unless we manage to solve the wormhole feedback loop problem and find a way to make them somewhat larger than sub-atomic.

[Satya]

Backwards time-travel is just downright impossible. I don't discount the slim possibility for going forwards, but to go backwards - essentially, to re-arrange everything in the universe to a previously-existing energetic, molecular and quantum state, is just laughable.

[jotabe]

Backwards time-travel is just downright impossible. I don't discount the slim possibility for going forwards, but to go backwards - essentially, to re-arrange everything in the universe to a previously-existing energetic, molecular and quantum state, is just laughable.

Travelling forward in time... man, we do it all the time. Currently i am travelling forward in time at a 1 s/s* ratio (s= earth seconds, s* = subjective seconds). If i start travelling at near-light speeds, i would be travelling forward in time at more than 1s/s*.

Backwards time travel is entirely possible, theoretically.
The same way that in flat-ish spacetime our light cone restricts us to moving forward in time, and any direction in space, inside the event horizon of a blackhole, you can only move forward in space (forward means towards the black hole) and can move forward or backward in time.
There are 2 inconvenients, though:
-You need to build a very hard travelling machine, that also can keep a flatish spacetime inside of it. Otherwise tidal gravity forces will tear you apart. Another chance is stay always very close to the event horizon, were tidal forces aren't too extreme yet.
-You can't get out of the event horizon, ever.

These inconvenients are workable if the infinite-universe interpretation of QM turns to be true: the distortion of spacetime because of the blackhole could make our universe touch, and merge, inside the black hole, with a parallel universe, which would likely be a perfect copy of ours, or differ very very slightly from ours. In this case, we would never be able to reach the center of the blackhole (the blackhole itself would have disappeared, only remaining the extreme spacetime distortion), so as we would travel in a straight line, we would exit through a white hole on the parallel universe.
If we take advantage of the curvature after the event horizon to travel back in time, we would be able to travel to the past of that parallel universe, which would be almost indistinguishable from the past of our own universe (maybe even completely indistinguishable, except for our presence there).

[Eaquae Legit]

If anyone else was avidly anticipating the waxing of the sunspot cycle and the chance to view more auroras, I have bad news for you. On the flip side, this does give us a chance to examine a phenomenon we never could in a lab.

[Rei]

I really really want to see an aurora and am so sad that I've never yet seen one.