Get Ready For A Cosmic Explosion Rerun Called ‘Supernova Requiem’ Spoiler Artist's impression of a star going supernova, or exploding. NASA It’s not often you get multiple chances to study the same stellar explosion, but astronomers actually have 16 years to get ready for an epic rebroadcast of a star blowing itself out to pieces. Around the year 2037, an exploding star nicknamed Supernova Requiem will once again light up in front of astronomer telescopes. It’s so far in the future we can’t even predict which telescopes will be available, although we can thank the Hubble Space Telescope for first spotting the supernova in 2016. (The name ”Requiem” comes from a related Hubble program called REsolved QUIEscent Magnified Galaxies or REQUIEM, in case you’re curious.) So how can this supernova be on rerun? Don’t these things only happen once? Happily, sometimes space gives us unique opportunities to perform time travel. A cool phenomenon known as gravitational lensing allows us to play with light, literally. Imagine what it will be like to look at this same supernova again in half a generation, but with much improved instruments and the accompanying advances in computer models and artificial intelligence. The scientific potential is exciting. “The rebroadcast is courtesy of a giant galaxy cluster that resides in front of the faraway supernova, whose light travelled for 10 billion years across space to reach Earth,” NASA’s Hubble website stated. “The massive cluster's powerful gravity acts like an oversized celestial zoom lens, magnifying and distorting the light from the supernova and splitting it into multiple copies.” Triple trouble: Inside the circles at left is a supernova's light mirrored three times. At right, ... [+] LEAD AUTHOR: STEVE A. RODNEY (UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA), GABRIEL BRAMMER (COSMIC DAWN CENTER/NIELS BOHR INSTITUTE/UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN) IMAGE PROCESSING: JOSEPH DEPASQUALE (STSCI) The cluster, which is called MACS J0138.0-2155, is full of dark matter. Dark matter is clusters of mass that we cannot see directly with conventional telescopes, although its presence shows up in how the gravity affects nearby objects. In this case, we’re going to get the rerun treat because the light from the supernova is slowly weaving its way through pockets of dark matter embedded in the cluster. Models suggest that eventually, the light will line up with the dark matter in such a way that the photons will get magnified, allowing us to once again spot the explosion from Earth. When Hubble spotted the supernova in triplicate in 2016, what was even more interesting was we could see the explosion at different moments in its evolution. This allows us to better build models on how supernovas change during explosion. The explosions were only seen in 2019, however, when Gabe Brammer, a study co-author at the Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, was looking at Hubble archival data to perform science for another program. When the rerun comes to light again, it will also help chart the expansion rate of the universe. This is because each of the four supernova images (the three seen in 2016 and the fourth predicted in 2037) will “offer clues to the type of warped-space terrain the exploded star's light had to cover,” NASA stated. This in turn allows the researchers to chart the dark matter map of the cluster. Dark matter is a huge influence on the expansion rate of the universe, and we’re still in a relatively early stage in building out where it is located in the universe. "It is a completely independent path to calculate the universe's expansion rate,” lead author Steve Rodney of the University of South Carolina in Columbia said in the same NASA statement. “The real value in the future will be using a larger sample of these [lensed images] to improve the precision." A peer-reviewed study based on the research was published in Nature Astronomy. https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizab...smic-explosion-rerun-called-supernova-requiem
woke my dog up. thought it was a neighbor making a bunch of noise or something till all of my friends were texting about it wish I would’ve known that was coming down so I could’ve walked outside to see it
Wait, was that what I saw in the sky earlier? Could you see it? Thought I was seeing shit or tripping out or something while driving home earlier
Yep that was it, saw it while driving and couldn’t figure out what i was looking at, then all of a sudden it was gone
I'm hoping it's taking pictures on the way up! Spoiler I would guess a few days of setup and calibration, but I have no clue
In the fifth and sixth months: Calibration and completion of commissioning. We will meticulously calibrate all of the scientific instruments’ many modes of operation while observing representative targets, and we will demonstrate the ability to track “moving” targets, which are nearby objects like asteroids, comets, moons, and planets in our own solar system. We will make “Early Release Observations,” to be revealed right after commissioning is over, that will showcase the capabilities of the observatory. After six months: “Science operations!” Webb will begin its science mission and start to conduct routine science operations.
That's amazing, no wonder it took so long to build, that thing is insanely complicated. Annnnnd now i'm fucking terrified something will go wrong. I remember they had to go up and fix the Hubble at one point, is that even going to be a possibility for this?
Probably has been answered but after it gets launched how long until we know if it works and how long before we get the first data back?
It’ll take about a month to get there, and about 6 months to get the first images after calibration. Also that video makes it seem so intense but they have a lot of backup systems since they can’t repair and they want it to last for a decade. It’s still a scientific marvel of an achievement tho
I feel like our technology is so close (but not there yet) where we can send out a repair drone with the satellite that would be able to evaluate and report any failures and we could send instructions to remotely fix.
Similar to how Hubble was basically a geospatial intelligence imagery satellite pointed the other way, I wonder how much similarly James Webb has with the newer generation overhead persistent infrared reconnaissance satellites.
All I could think of while watching that was “fuck, what if one of those tiny motors get off track and can’t deploy a sail? The whole process will be nerve wracking af
I had some debris get in the tracks of my sunroof once and cause to to jam. Can’t imagine the stress of perfection being the only option here.
I find it hard to believe there are no failsafes. I feel like every motor has to have a backup motor. The cost of installing that would be so tiny compared to the cost of the project failing.
I worked OPIR my last two years in the Air Force; it’s a really really cool system, a lot of which is unclassified but not really publicly talked about. The original systems were used to detect ICBM launches in Russia.
Several of them use highly elliptical orbits developed by the Russians for their communications satellites called “Molniya” orbits. The satellites move very slowly at apogee (farthest part of the orbit) and whip around the earth at perigee (nearest the earth), similar to how a comet orbits the sun (aphelion and perihelion respectively). That gives you a long dwell time over the northern latitudes, which for the Ruskies means they can keep satellites communications active over the poles with a fairly small number of satellites, and we can tell if we all need to run into bunkers with only a few satellites.
Not sure where to put this, but this is huge for energy. Safer and more energy efficent nuclear (fusion) is getting closer than "30 years out". https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908 First part explains Fission/Fusion, This starts where he talks about the news.
I understand the Fission Fear and wanting fusion, but I really think fusion needs another look, at least until something better gets developed. The US Navy has about 80 nuclear power plants in warships, each of which can power about 10k homes and had basically zero issues.
I think the real allure of fusion is the rock-solid guarantee that nothing will go wrong if humanity is removed from any step in the process. There is no meltdown, no thousand-year fallout isotope half lives, no poisoned atmosphere. Everything just stops. The chances of all the holes in the Swiss chees lining up are profoundly small, but...