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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]

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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday December 27 2015, @04:31AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday December 27 2015, @04:31AM (#281371) Journal

    I find that tittles are almost never misleading!

    You do know, don't you, that what was predicted was not the supernova, since that has happened a very long time ago. It was the secondary appearance of the supernova due to the gravitational lensing. Now, this may not be as astonishing as predicting an actual supernova, which as I understand it is a very difficult thing to do, and even then we are dealing with things that have already happened anyway, which would make it easy if we actually knew what has happened already, but it is still a rather large advance in predicting gravitationally lensed observations of supernovas that we already knew about. Going the other way will take more time.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @06:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @06:10AM (#281385)

    as an aside.
    please stop saying that if you were to predict the future of an observed star it would not be a prediction because it all happened a long time ago.
    since we do not have any information beyond some time t, any statement we make about the state of the system at t+delta t is literally a prediction. the word "prediction" is there because of the delta t, and the value of t itself doesn't really matter.

    I am a physicist, I find the title at least confusing, but I'm not awake enough to decide what could be done about it. If you're not a physicist, this means you are free to ignore any criticisms regarding the title.

    • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday December 27 2015, @06:48AM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Sunday December 27 2015, @06:48AM (#281389) Journal

      And who do you think you are, mister anonymous,, oh, physicist? Well, OK, then. I'll stop. But the point still stands. Yes, it is a prediction, but from the viewpoint of simultaneous time, which does not exist but I think would be a darn good idea, . . . Yeah, I'll just stop. But it still is noteworthy, even if the Muggle press got it all wrong and tried to tittle-ate us!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @11:08AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 27 2015, @11:08AM (#281413)

        well, it would be correct to say that this is a prediction of "general relativity + model of mass distribution between us and the supernova".

        from the point of view of supernova physics, it's not a prediction, it's just dumb luck.
        in any case, supernova physics probably did score a victory, in the sense that now we have more data to analyze.

        personally, I believe this is a big win for science.
        because space is bendy, we get a chance to look at the same thing twice.
        it reminds me of deja vu, a reasonably good movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453467/. [imdb.com]