Live data from Hacker News

JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

smithsonianmag.com

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

#61

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.

Astrophysicist here :) You are correct in some way to say that the star "squeezes" the core. During the evolution of massive stars, say stars roughly 8 times as massive as our sun, the core grows to a point where it just cannot support itself. It collapses and in consequence triggers the type 2 supernova. Another commenter already mentioned correctly that the remnant of the explosion is typically a neutron star or a black hole. The asymmetries seen in the gaseous remnant are caused by the explosion, which typically is highly asymmetric for stars of larger mass (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.02420, https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09707) CasA was a IIb explosion and the neutron star was found in '99 and graciously called 'CXOU J232327.8+584842'. If you want to know more theory about supernovae I highly recommend https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.2503 and others :)

Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

#63

Earlier 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…

Sounds like Battlestar Galactica without the Cylons.

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

#64

Earlier 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 .

Current measurements of neutrinos demonstrate them traveling nearly exactly the speed of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurements_of_neutrino_speed

Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

#65

Earlier 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 .

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.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_free_path

Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

#66
post #65

Earlier 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…

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

#67
post #65

Earlier 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.

Yes. This same phenomenon is how we study gamma ray bursts. The neutrinos are detected early enough that the gamma ray detecting satellites have time to be pointed at the source. Otherwise they would be far too brief to observe!

Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

#68

It'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…

Isn't "false vacuum state" equivalent to a non-zero vacuum energy ? Which we know is the case, because virtual particle pairs blinking into and out of existence ? Did I leave something important out ?

Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star

#69
post #47

Amazing 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.

Thank you!
Post reply on HN