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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday December 26 2015, @07:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the calling-your-shot dept.

Well, not precisely calling a supernova, but good enough to be exciting. A massive cluster is between us and the supernova, resulting in gravitational lensing. An article in astronomy.com says:

Many stars end their lives with a with a bang, but only a few of these stellar explosions have been caught in the act. When they are, spotting them successfully has been down to pure luck — until now. On 11 December, 2015, astronomers not only imaged a supernova in action, but saw it when and where they had predicted it would be. As the matter in the cluster [bending the light] — both dark and visible — is distributed unevenly, the light creating each of these images takes a different path with a different length [and taking a different time to reach Earth].

The supernova was seen in one of the images a year ago. It implies that the watchers were able to calculate the paths the light took, and predict when the supernova would appear in another image — and got it right. So, the takeaway is that no, they weren't able to make the prediction based on the instablility of the star, but they were able to calculate gravitational effects and predict the supernova would show elsewhere this month. Isn't that enough?


[Editor's Note: I realize that this covers much of the same material as this story from November, but in reading over the links provided here, they were more understandable to those of us with little understanding of the subject matter. - CMN]

[Editor's Note: Changed title from "The First Predicted Supernova" to "The First Predicted Supernova Appearance by Gravitational Lensing" - CMN]

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:42AM

    by cmn32480 (443) <reversethis-{moc.liamg} {ta} {08423nmc}> on Sunday December 27 2015, @02:42AM (#281352) Journal

    And as I said in the editors note, that I had very little understanding of the topic.

    Also, please bear in mind that as an editor, we are simply not able to read EVERY article and link as there are far too many.

    I should think it is also a little rough for you to expect us to understand every topic that gets talked about here, even in a general way.

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  • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Sunday December 27 2015, @03:12AM

    by CoolHand (438) on Sunday December 27 2015, @03:12AM (#281357) Journal
    Yeah! I for one ain't real bright... but I'm strong as an ox!
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