On 20 April 2016, the Sky and Telescope website reported a sustained brightening since February 2015 from magnitude 10.5 to about 9.2. A similar event was reported in 1938, followed by another outburst in 1946.[20] By June 2018, the star had dimmed slightly but still remained at an unusually high level of activity. In March or April 2023, it dimmed to magnitude 12.3.[21] A similar dimming occurred in the year before the 1945 outburst, indicating that it will likely erupt between March and September 2024.
And if I’m interpreting some of the other content correctly, it’ll come and go in one night? Maybe someone who knows more about these can confirm or correct me.. See update below.
Also …
Even when at peak magnitude of 2.5, this recurrent nova is dimmer than about 120 stars in the night sky.
Once its brightness peaks, it should be visible to the unaided eye for several days and just over a week with binoculars before it dims again, possibly for another 80 years.
Reminds me of when Betelgeuse, the orange upper star of Orion, went dim in 2020. Lots of amateur reports on its brightness, 3x per night, for a few months waiting for it to go nova. It settled down a bit before disappearing behind the sun for the season and came back just fine. It was kinda fun to monitor, but soooo many false alarms from people trying to call it first
So, there’s nothing in universe that is longer than “soon”. This prediction of going nova this year, only means it already happened but you can’t see it yet. And since it’s going super nova, that means entire even will be boring anyway. You’ll see a white dot that will increase in intensity during this year and then fade away equally slowly.
For people wondering about dates, there are none. Just like Beetlejuice is expected to explode soon™, that actually means 3000-10000+ years of waiting. So don’t get your hopes up. Out lives are but a blink in universe. All you can do is be diligent and watch it constantly. Doesn’t mean you’ll see much either since at peak magnitude of 2.5 it will be dim enough that you’ll need telescope to see it.
Nova, not supernova. Novas happen multiple times. Supernova do not but it doesn’t say supernova. Soon, as in within the next 6 months since its following a cycle that happened about 80 and 160 years ago.
Visible with unaided eyes for several days (but still dimmer than about 120 stars in the sky), and with binoculars for about a week, according to NASA.
That is fascinating, I want to know, is there any way to prevent this during assembly? Even with extreme clean room protocols! Does it happen with other telescopes?! Down the rabbit hole, I must go.
I get migraines or just started too. But never get head aches. Migraines for me just make light too overwhelming to look at but it isn’t pain. It’s almost confusion it causes me.
They mention this in the article, but the physiology would suggest this is related to CSF/blood pooling in low G.
Taking it a step further, I bet this has a similar mechanism to IIH or the high pressure headaches you get with obstructive hydrocephalus. CSF is supposed to drain down via a relatively passive system. Without G to regulate this I can envision that you’d essentially develop the same physiology as someone with IIH (too much CSF).
Really interesting. A good example of how we have no idea what insane health things we are going to experience with space travel, but also how space travel may shed insight on treatments for other conditions with similar mechanisms we experience in a gravity well.
Haven’t this is interesting because I’ve always wondered how evolution would happen when we finally colonize in low g environs. Maybe char was on to something when he said our souls are weighed down by gravity.
If Constellation on Apple TV is right, then it’s an indication that the person has become quantum entangled with their alternative self in another universe.
Good show btw if you are looking for something more psychological with a sci-fi background.
A minor accident had forced me down in the Rio de Oro region, in Spanish Africa. Landing on one of those table-lands of the Sahara which fall away steeply at the sides, I found myself on the flat top of the frustum of a cone, an isolated vestige of a plateau that had crumbled round the edges. In this part of the Sahara such truncated cones are visible from the air every hundred miles or so, their smooth surfaces always at about the same altitude above the desert and their geologic substance always identical. The surface sand is composed of minute and distinct shells; but progressively as you dig along a vertical section, the shells become more fragmentary, tend to cohere, and at the base of the cone form a pure calcareous deposit.
Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this . . . this iceberg: its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region.
I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.
But suddenly my musings on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man's fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably.
And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of this celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them.
Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.
Well that is some spectacular prose, I am truly transported to a place where spirituality and science meet at a single point of grand mystery and realization that I have felt a few times in real life, alone in nature at surprising places and odd hours, but Saint-Exupéry has taken this all one further level up the rung.
To a level that my father actually lived, as an airplane pilot in Baja California back when the peninsula didn’t have a paved road, an isolated, remote place as yet mostly untouched by man.
One minor caveat, however:
a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust
While I understand such a thoughtful writer was going for a feeling, surely with his talent he could have found a way to include windstorms, all the dust and sands they can sweep horizontally across the lands and over hills. The Rio De Oro region is in northern Morocco, surely it often gets blasted by powerful Saharan winds.
A sheet spread beneath the Moroccan sky most often receives desert-dust.
astronomy
Najstarsze
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.