Champagne Supernova

January 11, 2009

"Some day you will find me
Caught beneath the landslide
In a champagne supernova in the sky."
   -- Oasis, "Champagne Supernova"

Nobody pens an inscrutable lyric like fraternal singer/songwriter duo Noel and Liam Gallagher, chief members of the band Oasis, who scored a mega-hit in the 1990s with the seven-plus-minute rock ballad, "Champagne Supernova." Even Noel, who wrote the lyrics, has admitted he has no idea what the song is about, other than some vague notion that perhaps it has something to do with reincarnation. The creative mind works in mysterious ways. But it's haunting, yet catchy, and comes with a moodily psychedelic video to boot, with lots of Emo-brooding by vocalist Liam, and rail-thin models attempting some semblance of dance. (In their defense, it is not the most danceable tune.)

The exact origin of Type 1A supernovae is equally mysterious, although astrophysicists have a few ideas about what sorts of star systems are most likely to explode as supernovae. Type 1A supernovae are particularly important in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology because they serve as "standard candles" (distance markers) for measuring things like how fast our universe is expanding. (Answer: it's expanding at an accelerating rate.)

But there's always a chance of errors in those calculations, particularly if more distant supernovae differ from the closer ones. Knowing the initial conditions that set off Type 1A supernovae would enable astronomers to include any needed corrections. The result: even better measurements.

The leading candidates are recurrent novae. Ordinarily, a nova is a double star, where one star sloughs off matter onto its partner white dwarf star. This excess material gradually builds up on the white dwarf's surface until it triggers a runaway thermonuclear chain reaction -- think an explosion equivalent to a thousand-billion-billion hydrogen bombs, per Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University, who spoke at last week's AAS meeting in Long Beach.

This happens once every 10,000 years or so. In comparison, recurrent novae have multiple eruptions every century. Al you need is a binary system with a very high mass white dwarf star, and matter falling onto it very quickly to eventually have the white dwarf collapse ("caught beneath the landslide") and turn into a Type 1A supernova. Suddenly those Oasis lyrics seem eerily accurate, don't they? Maybe a Type 1A supernova could be viewed as the reincarnation of a recurrent novae. Or something. Metaphorical song lyrics aren't meant to be exact.

Anyway, Schaefer wanted to know if there are enough recurrent novae in the universe to account for the number of Type 1A supernovae observed, suspecting that perhaps many objects classified as ordinary novae were, in fact, recurrent novae. He turned to archival data -- old photographic plates -- to test that theory. "Archival data is the only way to see the long-term behavior of stars, unless you want to keep watch nightly for the next century," he says, although a 100-year-vigil would be a fantastic way to torture one's least favorite grad students. (As it happens, only one out of 25 novae are ever spotted, which Shaefer believes provides an opportunity for amateur astronomers to monitor the sky with digital cameras and help discover missing eruptions.)

Schaefer opted to bet on history. He combed through the two primary archives at Harvard College Observatory in Boston, and the headquarters of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) in Cambridge to find out, plus a couple of others (just to be thorough). Harvard alone has a collection of half a million old sky photos, with 1000-3000 shots of each star dating back to 1890. Among other discoveries, Schaefer's LSU colleague, Ashley Pagnotta, thought that one classical nova in particular, Nova Ophiuci 1998, had all the characteristics for a recurrent novae. Sure enough, one of the Harvard plates revealed an earlier eruption in 1900. It is, indeed, a recurrent novae.

Schaefer estimates that the total number of recurrent novae in the Milky Way is probably around 10,000 -- high enough to account for all the observed Type 1A supernovae. Who says those dusty old photographic plates are no longer useful?

The massive task of combing through all that historical data also yielded the first prediction of which star is likely to go nova in a particular year. There's a star system known as U Scorpii that should erupt any month now, with its very own worldwide collaboration in place to record the event in various regimes (x-ray, ultra-violet, optical, and infrared wavelengths). If that prediction pans out, astronomers will be able to pinpoint other similar events -- and keep massing more and better information about these mysterious objects.

Photos: (top) Multi-wavelength (x-ray, infrared and optical) compilation image of Kepler's supernova remnant, SN1604. Source: Chandra X-Ray Observatory (public domain). (bottom) Plate AM505 from the collection at Harvard University, showing the 1900 eruption of Nova Ophiuci 1998, predicted to be a recurrent nova with multiple eruptions every century. Credit: Ashley Pagnotta, Louisiana State University. Used with permission.

Comments

[Dale B. Ritter, B.A.]

The piece on Champaigne Supernovae deserves praise, a science feature pointing at thermonuclear matter transformation to rays and wave states of electromagnetic energy flow. One way to model stellar nova events is by Schrodinger wavefunctions expanded for timespace boundaries.
This method will build quantized relative definitions for: black holes, doppler redshifts, rays, waves, heat, charge, space, time, probability, magnetic, gravity, star emissions. The differentials of the GT atomic wavefunctions generate atomic topological force states as picoyoctotechnical animated interactive video graphs.

More details of grand unified RQ theory, discussions, graphics, essays, The Crystalon Door, more: www.symmecon.com.

Respectfully, Dale Ritter
www.symmecon.com
sgutmc@live.com

[Semyon Wainwright]

Dale Ritter's book is as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Ritter's technical jargon is devoid of real knowledge of quantum physics. For example pico(10 to the minus 12) and yocto (10 to the minus 24) are both different scales and cannot be jammed together to form picoyoctometers. If Ritter were in any way serious he'd put his jargon jumbled "theory" into peer review by real physicists.