AI Detected a Supernova All on Its Own gizmodo.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gizmodo.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A fourth-century supernova – Astronomy Now astronomynow.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from astronomynow.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Cosmic sleuths are attempting to locate one of the estimated one billion neutron stars in the Milky Way–the collapsed core of a doomed supergiant star with the density of atomic nuclei–that was ejected from the blast of a supernova in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way 1,700 years ago during the decline of the Roman Empire. The light of a supernova is visible across billions of light years, releasing as much energy in an instant as our sun will produce over its 10-billion-year lifetime. The suspected neutron star was identified in observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, in combination with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to study a supernova remnant in the Small Magellanic Cloud have determined light from the blast reached Earth 1,700 years ago during the decline of the Roman Empire. While it would have been visible to inhabitants of the southern hemisphere, there are no known records of any observations. Located some 200,000 light years away, the remnant is known as 1E 0102.2-7219. As shown below, gaseous knots in the expanding cloud of debris that are headed in Earth’s general direction are shown in blue while those moving away appear read. The cloud is expanding at an average speed of 3.2 million kilometres per hour, or 2 million mph. By measuring the motions of 22 clumps of oxygen-rich clumps of debris, researchers were able to determine when the supernova must have occurred. Likewise, they estimated the collapsed neutron star created in the blast must be moving at more than 3 million kilometres per hour.