“Fire, fire, where, fire, put it out…”
Indigo buntings, small, iridescent finches, bits of azure sing this jumbled warning from the edges and tickets, mocking the humans in their endless bustle. The hayfield is fragrant, a fresh cutting drying in the early June sun, the wholesome scent wafting on a gentle breeze. Mother Nature is excited about Friday this morning, charming in a sundress of new poplar leaves, setting out her flowers in the lush tangle of rural Virginia. A young buck looks up as I jog past, and lazily outpaces me.
Showoff.
Whatever, man. I’ve seen the supernova. And here’s the report. Happy Friday - it sure is a nice one.
SN 2023ixf
21 million years ago, a massive star had a bad day. If it was a person, we would have called it driven. “You work too hard” it’s mother would have said, if stars had mothers. “Stop building so many elements. Your little brother stopped at carbon, and he’s fine.”
“No, ma, I’m destined for bigger things!”
And it kept right on shining, fusing heavier and heavier elements in it’s core. Each accomplishment would release energy, pushing back against the crushing weight of the outer layers. (Commodities traders thought they had it bad.)
The star knew it should stop, should take a trip to the local Lagoon nebula and relax, should read some Hawking and then zap sunbathers with some radiation, but…the chase for the Next Thing felt unstoppable. Each time an element was fused, energy and light sparked, pushing back against the heavy outer layers.
Helium. Carbon. Oxygen. Easy peasy.
Neon. Sing some songs about Neon Stars, earth peasants.
Magnesium. Silicon. No chip shortage here.
Sulfur. Argon. Nobility. Spiffing, spiffing.
Getting enough CALCIUM, folks?
Titanium. Now that song’s stuck in everyone’s head.
Chromium. I’m unstoppable. I feel so alive.
Iron. Cue the Sabbath! Wait…Oh man…Anyone got any pepto? And…I’m so tired…
The iron didn’t have the kick of the other elements. In fact, it absorbed energy. With nothing to push back against the stupendous weight of the outer layers, more and more mass flowed into the core, and suddenly, the whole roof fell in. Faster and faster, rushing, crushing, inward, ever inward, the pressure off the charts…Until…
BAM!
The neutrons in the iron core formed a wall, a hard surface, and all of the collapsing matter bounced off this in a gargantuan ricochet, ripping the star apart in a cosmic cherry bomb.
(Sometimes the collapse continues into a black hole if there’s enough mass to crush the neutrons. If not, it stops at a neutron star, a city-sized object so dense, a sugar cube sized chunk would weigh as much as a mountain.)
“Oh man…I should have taken a vacation.”
In one last display of brilliance, this supernova shone across intergalactic space, and all the nerds on earth went “ooooo!”
Sometimes a supernova can output the light of 10 billion suns.
What it Looked Like
The forest fire smoke finally cleared (fogging the skies all the way from Canada), the rains lifted, but…the moon was out Wednesday evening, throwing beautiful silvery rays of light pollution across the sky, an enthusiastic toddler crashing a serious Zoom meeting with cries of “hiiiii!” (It’s hard to be angry with the moon.)
I aimed the 12.5” reflecting telescope towards the handle of the Big Dipper. 2023ixf blew up in the Messier 101 galaxy, our nearest supernova in a decade, “only” 21 million light years away. (A light year is equal to 5.88 trillion miles.)
Nothing. Not even a faint haze of the galaxy.
On a good dark night, Messier 101 looks like a smudge on the lens, a faint haze of light. For my blind friends, try this: On your palm, use your opposite hand’s index fingernail to touch points. These would be the stars in the area. Then, blow a small puff of air at your palm. This illustrates the diffuse, vague impression the galaxy gives to an observer, contrasting the sharply-defined stars.
The haze (or puff of air) is the combined light of a trillion stars in Messier 101, 21 million light years away. None of them are individually resolved in my telescope, blending instead into an anonymous blur. This is an important point.
The moonlight washed the entire thing out. All I could see was the “local” stars in our own galaxy, at most a few thousand light years distant (many are “only” hundreds of light years away).
My finder chart rustled in the slight breeze. I flipped on my red flashlight. “Okay, okay, line up those like a target, and note this circle of stars here, which means that…yes! That one doesn’t belong. That’s a “new” star. That must be it!”
And indeed it was. A tiny star, like a half dozen other tiny stars in the eyepiece. Shining with a warm white light, it appeared indistinguishable from any other faint point of light. I checked, and re-checked. It wasn’t a star usually on the chart.
It was the supernova.
Big Deal
You all would have been disappointed…at first.
“It just looks like another dot, man.”
Yeah, but it’s what you’re looking at.
It’s not a star in this galaxy. It’s a star in the next galaxy, ten thousand times farther away than the other stars in the eyepiece, shining for a brief moment in time, soon to disappear forever, the husk of a neutron star or the consuming invisibility of a black hole in it’s place.
Glancing up, I noted the neighbor’s porch light a quarter mile away.
If we scaled things down a bit, and that porch light were one of the “ordinary” stars in my eyepiece, the supernova would be a streetlight in Seattle.
The glittering city itself would have appeared as a blended haze, save one point of light, blazing in a final hurray with fiery intensity across echoing intergalactic space.
Boom.
Treasures from Earth
Have a great weekend, folks. I’m off to put the finishing touches on a talk about the 1780’s in music, so it seems fitting to spin Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 “Jupiter” in C major, K. 551. Enjoy this performance of the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Chamber Orchestra, with Hartmut Haenchen on the podium.
And clear skies to you!