A type Ia supernova discovered Wednesday, August 24, in the nearby galaxy M101 in Ursa Major is the nearest type Ia supernova astronomers have found since 1986. The brightness of this exploding star is on the rise, and it could be visible in a 6-inch telescope within a week or so.
Good work, Dave. The article and graphic, not the supernova. It will be interesting to see how bright it gets. Could you arrange one nearby in the Milky Way? Just not TOO nearby. I don't want any of those beams to melt my shingles.
I just nailed SN2011fe (originally coded as PTF11kly) a few hours ago. Please see www.perseus.gr/Astro-DSO-Supernovae-SN2011fe-20110826.htm .
Using differential photometry (AIP4Win V2.4.0) and GSC 3852:1108 (mag 11.7) and GSC 3852:1069 (mag 11.9) as comparison and check stars, respectively, I get an estimate for SN2011fe of mag 13.290 (+/- 0.003).
Anthony.
i am not even an amateur astronomer. just a huge lover of space. friday night i was sitting on my patio looking towards what i have just learned is where M101 is. i had my starwalk app up on my ipad, i saw a very bright star that was definitely not there minutes before. i grabbed the ipod with the app open, pointed it there at the sky to see what it could tell me. the star began to fade.... and then it completely disappeared. i was convinced i saw a supernova. not until tonight i looked up supernova discoveries for august 2011 and low and behold..... so i looked into it further, gathering location and names, then pointed skywalk at the same place in the sky, moved my finger slightly over on the screen and there it was. M101. what i saw was with the naked eye in jackson, mississippi. since this event cannot be seen in it's entirety yet, could what i saw in just minutes have been a bright pulse? i almost can't believe i saw this, but it must have been a bit of this supernova. any feedback would be greatly appreciated. thank you!
apleiadean, sorry to say, whatever you saw was not the supernova. It is still there. They fade slowly, and you wouldn't see this one just looking up, without using binoculars. It is far too faint because it is in a galaxy 21 million light years away.(A light year is the DISTANCE that light, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, goes in 21 million years. It is a gigantic number of miles. If you tried to write the distance in miles, the number of zeroes makes the number meaningless, and too long to write out.)
There are a lot of satellites and space junk up there. If sunlight hits the solar panels on a satellite just right, you will see a flash from the ground. It might have been some space junk burning up as it hit the top of the atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour.
apleiadean, the definition of a light year above should have read 'the distance light travels in ONE year'. You need to multiply that enormous distance by the number of light years, in the case of the supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy, 21, to get the total distance to supernova. One light year is about 5,878,625,000,000,000 miles. Multiply that by 21, and you get the distance to the supernova in the Pinwheel in miles. That is a LONG way.