Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Shattered” seems like an odd way of describing it but at some level… sure.
> “Shattered” seems like an odd way of describing it Would love for an astrophysicist to pine in. But my understanding is supernovae are usually balanced enough to squeeze their stars' cores. This appears to have been unbalanced such that the core was "broken" instead of uniformly compressed.
JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#62Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supernova are powerful enough that even a star in a different solar system going nova can kill you, if it's a "nearby" system. But I believe there aren't any stars close enough that would go supernova any time soon.
A good premise for a sci-fi series: In the distant future, a large fleet of earth's best and brightest travels the stars while desperately trying to invent Earth's last ditch-effort to save its 12 billion inhabitants from a soon-to-be cataclysmic, near-earth supernovae: FTL travel. After decades of progress finally nears fruition, the fleet permanently loses contact with earth; humanity's home Solar System's remnants…
Perhaps the story could have Cylons in it, but here they're allies with the humans, but after the supernova, some religious leader convinces most of them that their god wants them to destroy the humans.
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
The radiation propagates at light speed, but the harmless neutrinos reach us a few hours before the potentially dangerous X-rays and gamma rays. A supernova would have to be within roughly 160 light years to be damaging to Earth. https://news.fnal.gov/2019/03/waiting-for-neutrinos/ https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/safe-distance-from...
> but the harmless neutrinos reach us a few hours before the potentially dangerous X-rays and gamma rays. Huh? Presumably the electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, and neutrinos travel more slowly; so the neutrinos arrive after the dangerous rays, not before .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The radiation propagates at light speed, but the harmless neutrinos reach us a few hours before the potentially dangerous X-rays and gamma rays. A supernova would have to be within roughly 160 light years to be damaging to Earth. https://news.fnal.gov/2019/03/waiting-for-neutrinos/ https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/safe-distance-from...
> but the harmless neutrinos reach us a few hours before the potentially dangerous X-rays and gamma rays. Huh? Presumably the electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, and neutrinos travel more slowly; so the neutrinos arrive after the dangerous rays, not before .
Since the light emitted from the inner core during the supernova is instantly absorbed by the matter collapsing inward, it must be re-emitted and re-absorbed many times before it can reach open space and begin its journey to earth. With such an incredibly high density in the core of the collapsing star, the mean free path [1] of the light is extremely short, so this process can take a very long time.
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but the harmless neutrinos reach us a few hours before the potentially dangerous X-rays and gamma rays. Huh? Presumably the electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, and neutrinos travel more slowly; so the neutrinos arrive after the dangerous rays, not before .
You are correct that the radiation travels at the speed of light and the neutrinos less than that. The detail you’re missing is that the neutrinos depart the inner core of the star during the initial stages of the supernova and pass right through all of that material unimpeded. Though they travel at less than the speed of light, it’s not very much less, so the head start the neutrinos have allows them to arrive first…
So the early arrival of the neutrinos is entirely the result of EM radiation being absorbed within the star and re-emitted, while the neutrinos can pass straight through. I wondered if that was the explanation.
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct that the radiation travels at the speed of light and the neutrinos less than that. The detail you’re missing is that the neutrinos depart the inner core of the star during the initial stages of the supernova and pass right through all of that material unimpeded. Though they travel at less than the speed of light, it’s not very much less, so the head start the neutrinos have allows them to arrive first…
OK, thanks. So the early arrival of the neutrinos is entirely the result of EM radiation being absorbed within the star and re-emitted, while the neutrinos can pass straight through. I wondered if that was the explanation.
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#68It's kind of fun to think that at any moment something might pop and our entire solar system would disappear in a blink of an eye.
Here’s a fun theoretical existential threat: false vacuum decay. If our universe is in a false vacuum state (maybe yes? maybe no? we don’t know!) and that vacuum someday suddenly shifts into a true vacuum state (decays), then worst case scenario this change propagates everywhere instantaneously and we experience “complete cessation of fundamental forces” including elementary particles and structures. Everything every…
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#69Amazing photo. At the end of the Netflix documentary about JWST "Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine" they state the telescope data would be available for everyone to use. Is that actually true, or did they mean just these full res images?
I had a quick play with stuff around when the first images were announced. A ton of info is available including stages of processing, details on instruments, info (including Jupyter tutorials) on the Python calibration pipeline, etc. And of course how to access the data. https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/getting-started-with-jwst-data seems like a good spot to start.