In the Dark

Very exciting news today – a supernova has gone off in Messier 82. In fact, according to this sequence of images from Japan it actually started to brighten about a week ago:

Being arranged in Japanese fashion, you have to read these from top to bottom but starting at the right, so the supernova can be seen to be steadily brightening, i.e. decreasing in magnitude from 17.0 to 11.9. That means it’s now visible with binoculars and will have been seen already by many amateur astronomers. The exciting question this time is whether we’ll get any neutrinos from it!

UPDATE: I’m told that, close as it is, M82 is probably too far to detect neutrinos. Boo.

This is the nearest supernova since 1987a which was observed in, er, 1987. This is the nearest Type Ia supernova for a very long time (possibly 1937), so it’s of considerable interest for the use of such objects in cosmology. There have been other close ones since the nearest one I can remember, 1987a, which was observed in, er, 1987 but all have been Type II.

UPDATE: Thanks for the people who pointed out my error which I’ve left in to show that I don’t know much about supernovae so you shouldn’t phone me up to ask.

This entry was posted on January 22, 2014 at 2:10 pm and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, Cosmology, M82, neutrinos, supernova, Supernova in M82. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.