This supernova has been hyped lately but is not something a casual observer will find to be particularly exciting. It is best seen with a telescope and will appear as a faint dot of light. The brightness will be magnitude 10 or 11, or about 100 times fainter than what the unaided eye can see in dark skies far from city lights. For more information, see<p><a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/128430288.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingbl...</a><p>or<p><a href="http://washedoutastronomy.com/content/another-urban-supernova?page=1" rel="nofollow">http://washedoutastronomy.com/content/another-urban-supernov...</a><p>or<p><a href="http://www.dailycalifornian.org/how-to-spot-new-supernova-in-nearby-galaxy-space-com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailycalifornian.org/how-to-spot-new-supernova-in...</a>
People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the nighttime sky, and we now have the technical means to discover lots of new things.<p>One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (<a href="http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/" rel="nofollow">http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/</a>) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They <i>automatically</i> detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., <a href="http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/" rel="nofollow">http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/</a>).<p>One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (<a href="http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale" rel="nofollow">http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale</a>).<p>There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).
Reading things like this always brings me back to the Fermi Paradox [1]. There are <i>lots</i> of stars in our galaxy. Our observation of many nearby planetary systems and our understanding of the chemistry of life suggests life should be <i>relatively</i> common but we've seen no evidence of it.<p>While life (on Earth) is at times incredibly resilient it's also really fragile. A supernova such as this must essentially sterilize space for light years around it and it bathes its neighbourhood in gamma radiation. Did this kill off some nascent civilization? Supernovas seem to be relatively rare (compared to the number of stars) but think: over <i>billions</i> of years what are the odds that such a thing--or something equally as deadly such as an asteroid or comet impact--<i>won't</i> happen?<p>Space in incomprehensibly vast. The energy required to travel to even the nearest star systems seems... prohibitive.<p>I'm inclined to think that there are also simply too many of us on this planet, a problem that we'll either correct or will be corrected for us as resources start to run out in the next century or two [2].<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY</a>
Now I wish even more that I were back at school in Providence, the Brown observatory is open to the public. This would be a good humbling beginning to the school year.