I took this #astrophoto of the galaxies around M59 and M60 with my spouse’s 300mm zoom lens on May 20 that included the butterfly galaxies without knowing of the #supernova 2023ijd in NGC 4568 (the “bottom wing”). No pointer, and you will need to zoom in on the two galaxies in the bottom right to see it.
Preliminary report of the discovery of a probable nova in M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) on 2023 May 28.063 UT by astronomers using the 0.65-m telescope at Ondrejov, Czech Republic.
The object designated PNV J00421981+4107048 is located at R.A. = 0h42m19s.81, Decl. = +41o07'04".8, which is 276.7" west and 543.7" south of the center of M31. Mag 18.1 in R.
M31, at 2.5 million light-years distance, is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way.
FYI - the Andromeda galaxy M31 and our Milky Way galaxy will be pulled together by their mutual gravity and will collide in about 4 billion years. 2 billion years later, the two galaxies will merge to form a single galaxy.
Below is an animation from NASA of the collision and merger.
I finally managed to process my own image of the #SN2023ixf supernova in #M101.
Crazy to think this event actually happend some 21 million years ago, but we can still observe it changing brightness in mere days.
I am impressed by how well @thunderbird handles the UX end-to-end encryption via PGP. Adding a key for a new recipient works well, and I haven't had to resort to command line gpg yet.
@killyourfm@neil@thunderbird No problem, Jason 😊. I understand this.
The thing is, today I had to send an account password to one of my customers. So I wrote an e-mail and sent the password parallel via #Threema. I just want to get away from this 😅
I´m exited to see #Supernova and all the new things that we will see this year. Maybe Supernova is a good cause to dig deeper into encryption for me.
I posted yesterday about the supernova in M101. Here's the full M101 image I captured. About 3 hours of 5-minute exposures in LRGB through my C8 with Starizona SCT Corrector IV, using an ASI533MM Pro camera. Processed in PixInsight. #astrophotography#supernova#m101
AAVSO finder chart for the field of #supernova#2023ixf in #M101, plotted with a 1º field of view and a limiting magnitude of 14. Comparison star magnitudes are shown without decimal points, so, e.g., "119" = magnitude +11.9.
@ianRobinson Unfortunately, supernovae are much weaker GW sources than black hole (or even neutron star) mergers. Even now in O4, #LIGO (and VIRGO and KAGRA) would almost certainly not be able to detect a #supernova outside our Milky Way.
(But they will definitely look for it, just in case we ever get a very strange supernova; as in this paper a few years ago: https://inspirehep.net/literature/1748866)
A new Type II core-collapse Supernova SN 2023ixf was detected yesterday in the Pinwheel Galaxy (aka Messier 101, M101 and NGC 5457).
At 21 million light-years distance and only 14.9 mag, it is too far and too faint to stand out in the night sky, unlike some other supernovae observed by humans over the past few thousand years.
However, it is of great interest to the astrophysics community.
Details at https://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023ixf #M101#SN2023ixf#science#Supernova
1/n
The light curve of supernova SN 2023ixf so far, based on various observations listed at https://www.wis-tns.org/object/2023ixf
Note that lower magnitude values are brighter.
A reduction by 1 on the magnitude scale implies an increase in luminosity by a factor of 2.512.
When will luminosity peak and at what value?
We know that it will take months for luminosity to gradually decline, perhaps with an intervening plateau.
Supernova SN2023ixf continues to brighten!
A more recent photometric measurement of supernova SN2023ixf made by the Virtual Telescope shows a magnitude of 10.9 today Sunday May 21 at 21:08 UTC (5:08 p.m. EDT).
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-km-sized neutrino detector at the South Pole, did not detect any neutrinos arriving from the direction of supernova SN2023ixf in the M101 galaxy over the past 4 days. @franco_vazza and @coreyspowell indicate that this is expected, given the vast distance to SN2023ixf - 21 million light-years.
The observations set an upper limit on the energy of neutrinos from SN2023ixf. https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=16043 https://icecube.wisc.edu/ #M101#SN2023ixf#Supernova
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Here is an updated chart of photometric measurements of supernova SN2023ixf.
The new addition is one made by the Spanish Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands at 22:13 UTC last night and reported at https://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=16046
I also changed the trendline to use a 3rd order polynomial instead of a 2nd order one, which gives better results at the ends of the curve. #M101#SN2023ixf#Supernova
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Looking at this graph, one might deduce that SN2023ixf has peaked in brightness, 4 days after it went supernova. We will need to wait and see how it evolves. The good news is that astronomers have observations before and after the event and many telescopes are now focused on it. #M101#SN2023ixf#Supernova
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How will the brightness of the Type II supernova SN2023ixf evolve in the coming days and months?
Here is some guiding info -
Luminosity of a Type II SN rises for 1-3 weeks and then declines over months.
Type II-L SNe have a steady decline rate, while Type II-P supernova exhibit an intermediate plateau period with a reduced decline rate.
The average decay rate of 0.008 mag per day is much lower than that of Type Ia SNe.
Here is a nice article on Koichi Itagaki, the discoverer of SN2023ixf (and a hundred others), incl. a pic of his private observatory located on the slopes of Mount Zao.
"The observatory has 4 domes and 5 telescopes. The main telescope is a 600 mm reflector flanked by another 500 mm and three 210 mm ones.
Koichi also has a remotely operated Takanezawa–Tochigi Observatory with reflectors of size 500 mm, 350 mm, 300 mm, and 210 mm."
Archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope of the progenitor of supernova SN2023ixf indicates that the progenitor was a red supergiant with an Apparent Magnitude of 24.39 in the red filter band on Nov 11, 2002. Not detected in bluer bands.
Supergiants have masses 10 to 70 times the Sun (M☉) and luminosities from 1,000 to over a million times the Sun (L☉). They fuse elements all the way to iron and then explode as supernovae.