This will be a really nice light show http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525695,00.html http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/06/09_betelim.shtml
Wicked There are too many things out there to learn about all in one lifetime. One can try though. I feel like i want to go to school for chem/bio/physics and physiology. Just not enough damn time.
Cool, I hope we get to see it in our lifetimes. Supernovas in our own galaxy happen rarely, relatively speaking, the last one visible in the Milky Way was in 1604. http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/snr.html
well, last one visible that we had technology to see... or last one visible from earth. lots of other vantage points to see it potentially
I don't think any other potential vantage points would change the view of Betelguese blowing up (assuming it happens in our lifetime). heheh Unless you planned on inventing warp drives soon? Is there something you're not telling us, hmmm?
well technically if we live to see it then it has happened already since it is so many light years away.... don't we have telescopes so powerful we can basically see back in time? point it in that bad boy's direction!
you miss my point entirely. it was in response to "the last one visible in the Milky Way was in 1604." which i read as implying it was visible from within the Milky Way and not the last supernova within the Milky Way, which had it been worded as such would make much more sense. though my statement was still that there could have been others in the Milky Way visible from within the Milky Way but not from Earth.
I would guess they are saying that it was the last visible super nova that occured in the milky way, not the way you took it. Wasn't there a more recent super nova that was recorded?
here's a link from nasa regarding the supernovas. There was one about 140 years ago as well as the one in the 1600 's discussed in the article, which occurred in the milky way. http://cio.gsfc.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/may/HQ_08126_Chandra_Supernova.html
You're kind of right. In actuality, we are all seeing "back in time". We see things as they were when the light left them and started making its journey to our eyes. When I'm looking at my computer screen, I'm seeing it as it was 0.00000000168 seconds ago. The "back in time" effect is completely relative and dependent on the distance the object is from the viewer. So since Betelgeuse is 600 light years from us we are seeing it as it was 600 years ago. Pointing a telescope at it would just make the same image we see now but larger. The farther away something that we observe is the farther "back in time" we are seeing at because of the time it took the light to travel to our telescopes. Ergo, if we look at a quasar that is 13+ billion light years away we are seeing something that took place 13 billion years ago, so basically we are seeing the universe as an infant and most likely seeing galaxies like our actually beginning their lives.
Yeah, I remember trying to argue with my high school PE coach that because he was standing on the outside lane, it gave the runners in those lanes an unfair advantage because he was seeing their light before mine! Unfortunately he knew it was only a zillionth of a millimeter advantage and suggested I should just shut up and run.
wow that nasa site is awesome i saved it i feel like my brain is on overload now and love it good info i deffinetly learned something today.... i wanna live in the space station btw lol that would be awesome..
There are hundreds of supernovas recorded a year - but it only seems to happen once every few generations that one is visible to the unaided eye.