Observing Supernova

so what I just found was very very interesting and it is about observing of Supernovas which are those exploding stars or white dwarfs.

The problem with observation of these very bright objects is that first of all there is not much of them and second, it is extremely hard to catch the start of the explosion so we do not have much data about it.

This problem seems to have really awesome solution that is based on nothing else than Einstein’s gravitational lensing.

Gravitational lensing is effect of very massive thing like black hole or galaxy or even galaxy cluster. It can increase the amount of light coming to us or bend the light. So actually when you are looking to star right next to Sun it may appear on different spot than it actually is!

Actually I am pretty sorry but not only that you see everything in past but you see it actually on the wrong place, DAMN! (And if you run it is bluer).

So because of this light bending it can happen that the light even comes from different directions.

The picture above shows how we could observe one event (one supernova type Ia) four times in different time intervals just because it was in huge super cluster which bend the light from supernova so much that it came to us in different directions.

This particular observation was done only by accident when one astronomer was looking at pictures from Hubble and he saw it.


Supernova picture
Gravitational bending

PS: today I have reached 400 visitors!


One thought on “Observing Supernova

Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s