An Amateur Astronomer Accidentally Caught The First-Ever Photo of an Exploding Star

a reply to: gortex

The artist in me sees 4 angry white whale eyes in the OP photo - want to paint that.

a reply to: gortex

I dont really understand that graph, but it appears to say the entire explosion lasted about a half hour? The numbers along the bottom indicate minutes transpired. So...Thats pretty cool if true.

a reply to: 3n19m470

It lasted longer than that but those are a just few of the images images he captured showing how it brightened , a team of professional astronomers monitored it for two months after he discovered what he had captured.

originally posted by: carewemust
a reply to: gortex

When I see photos of explosions and collisions, my first thoughts are, "I wonder if billions of intelligent being just died." Rather than get excited, sudden mass destruction makes me sad.

Maybe the elements from that explosion will help to seed a new star system, and 5 or 10 billion years from now, there could be life that would not be possible without that explosion.

Maybe the one that just exploded had life too...maybe they were a bunch of evil monsters and they had Just sent out their invasion fleet to Earth where they would grant us all immortality including digging up graves to clone all the dead people from every scrap of DNA they can find, just so they can torture us endlessly for trillions of years... but then, the star exploded, killing them all... but the new system that is seeded will create a benevolent life form that will come save us. Cause in ten billion years we will be about the same but with better iphones.

a reply to: gortex

How do they know it was an exploding star?

I seen one. With naked eyes. Felt the blast wave aswell. Came out for smoke. Light up and looked up for. A star seems getting brighter. Then it exploded. All in few milliseconds. Very wierd experience.

a reply to: Pandaram

That is cool, weird, stuff that we should know about!!

I’ve been saying that light is weirder than we know and if what you experienced is true... well damn.

originally posted by: Pandaram
I seen one. With naked eyes. Felt the blast wave aswell. Came out for smoke. Light up and looked up for. A star seems getting brighter. Then it exploded. All in few milliseconds. Very wierd experience.

That would more likely be caused by something from space entering the earth's atmosphere. Smaller objects doing that tend to burn up, or if a little larger they can explode in the sky, and if larger still the explosion can be dramatic like in Chelyabinsk. The shock wave from that broke windows etc but many people felt that so it would be hard for a similar event to be unnoticed by others. If it was heading toward you then it could appear to be a stationary object getting brighter until it exploded.

The amateur astronomer was using a telescope to see the exploding star which probably can't even be seen with the naked eye. That's a very interesting discovery, what luck!

originally posted by: Pandaram
I seen one. With naked eyes. Felt the blast wave aswell. Came out for smoke. Light up and looked up for. A star seems getting brighter. Then it exploded. All in few milliseconds. Very wierd experience.

Sounds like a fireball/meteor. Novae & supernovae brighten in minutes or hours and stay bright for weeks or months.

originally posted by: Phage
Now, if he had gotten the pictures on purpose...that would be something.

Or made it happen himself!

EDIT: Actually, I suppose that if you had enough telescopes and computing power to constantly scan the skies, including deep into other galaxies as well as our own, there are at any given moment thousands of not millions of stars exploding that might be imaged. He got pretty lucky, but as our sky-scanning gets bigger and better, this kind of thing will happen more often.

a reply to: gortex

So what you're saying is he caught it 6 minutes before its light was visible to Earth? I didn't get a chance to read the article, how long before the light is no longer visible?