Hubble creates time lapse movie of fading supernova
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created a time lapse movie showing the fading of a supernova in a nearby galaxy over a year.
The supernova is captured by Hubble in exquisite detail within this galaxy in the left portion of the image. It appears as a very bright star located on the outer edge of one of its beautiful swirling spiral arms. This new and unique time-lapse of Hubble images created by the ESA/Hubble team shows the once bright supernova initially outshining the brightest stars in the galaxy, before fading into obscurity during the year of observations. This time-lapse consists of observations taken over the course of one year, from February 2018 to February 2019.
The video of that time lapse is embedded below the fold.
The galaxy itself is located 70 million light years away. That the supernova of this single star initially outshone the entire galaxy indicates the almost unimaginable power of the explosion.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have created a time lapse movie showing the fading of a supernova in a nearby galaxy over a year.
The supernova is captured by Hubble in exquisite detail within this galaxy in the left portion of the image. It appears as a very bright star located on the outer edge of one of its beautiful swirling spiral arms. This new and unique time-lapse of Hubble images created by the ESA/Hubble team shows the once bright supernova initially outshining the brightest stars in the galaxy, before fading into obscurity during the year of observations. This time-lapse consists of observations taken over the course of one year, from February 2018 to February 2019.
The video of that time lapse is embedded below the fold.
The galaxy itself is located 70 million light years away. That the supernova of this single star initially outshone the entire galaxy indicates the almost unimaginable power of the explosion.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
When this event happened, dinosaurs walked the earth. And did so another five million years.
What are the rest of the stars/objects in that field? Are they other stars in that same galaxy as the supernova, as the text seems to imply? Or are they other galaxies and quasars, or stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, that were caught in the frame?
El: Since galaxies are made of billions of stars, the Milky Way cannot have other galaxies in it, as all galaxies are a collection of stars. In this case we are looking out of our galaxy to another 70 million light years away.
Most of the bright patches you see in this movie are made up of that distant galaxy’s stars, which like the Milky Way (our own galaxy in which the Sun resides) blend to form bright areas.
I would guess that most of the stars you see in this image are from this galaxy, not our Milky Way, though it is possible one or two are from our galaxy that happen to be in the line of sight.
As for quasars, they are thought to be the central supermassive black hole of very very distant galaxies. While the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its center, it is not a quasar, as such objects are very energetic, and ours right now is very inactive. It is also much smaller than a quasar.
I hope that answers your questions.
@El
All the stars here look to me like they are in the same galaxy, NGC 2525. A star in our galaxy would be as bright as the supernova at its brightest. A few of the spots might be galaxies in the far background. The blue spots are typical for star forming regions, where there are very bright short lived hot blue giant stars that go supernova at an age of only a few tens of million years. Most of the light from a spiral galaxy comes from such stars. There are not more stars in the spiral arms than between them, it is just that the spiral arms are a standing wave where gas gets more dense (like a car congestion at traffic lights) and thus more stars are formed there. Since the brightest stars are short lived, they don’t have time to leave their spiral arms which thus are more visible. The vast majority of stars are older fainter red dwarfs or Sun-like that have passed through the spiral arms many times.
El–
You might find this informative:
Physics 20B. Cosmology.
Lec. 17: “Universe of Galaxies”
Dr. James Bullock, UC Irvine 2015
https://youtu.be/Q38KsVD_QvM
42:17
the short visual version….
“2dF Galaxy Redshift survey”
The distribution of 220,000+ Galaxies
2003
https://youtu.be/14yG_YER3xc
1:12
“The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (Two-degree-Field Galaxy Redshift Survey), 2dF or 2dFGRS is a redshift survey conducted by the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) with the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope between 1997 and 11 April 2002. The data from this survey were made public on 30 June 2003. The survey determined the large-scale structure in two large slices of the Universe to a depth of around 2.5 billion light years (redshift ~ 0.2).”
[->One Key factoid take-a-way: for this 2 degree wide slice of sky, out to 2.5 Bly’s, they encountered 12K objects which are single stars, and 232K galaxies.]
“In total, the photometry of 382,323 objects were measured, which includes spectra for 245,591 objects, of which 232,155 were galaxies (221,414 with good quality spectra), 12,311 are stars, and 125 are quasi-stellar objects (quasars).
“The movie uses the actual positions of galaxies in the 2dF survey and genuine galaxy images, but for artistic effect the galaxy sizes have been greatly exaggerated compared to their separations.”