by Nereid » Thu Jun 09, 2011 7:26 pm
Beyond wrote:That was a pretty neat video of the reflection, Nereid. It brought to mind a song the Supremes sang about 'reflections'. From what i could make out from the video, It would seem that the supernovae and the reflection are about equal distance from here, and that we are getting the reflection from angled sides of what is doing the reflecting, not like if the reflecting surface was actually behind(farther away)the supernovae, in which case you could actually say the past is being reflected back to us. Of course i might have missed something.Which,alas,is all too common.
Glad you liked it Beyond.
Your understanding is correct, in that the dust reflecting the supernova explosion is not behind the supernova, but off to one side. But it's not really a question of being behind vs off to one side; rather that what we see coming from the dust is light that has travelled further - ~400 light-years further - than the x-rays we see from the supernova remnant. If there were suitable clumps of dust ~200 light-years behind the position of the supernova (and just a fraction of a degree off-line), we'd see the same thing (ignoring any relative motion between the dust and the supernova (remnant)).
Also, the dust is not a mirror, so recovering any image from the reflected light would be exceedingly difficult; of course, careful time-lapse records would - or might - allow reconstruction of the light-curve of the supernova (i.e. how bright it was as a function of time), and taking spectra of the reflected light allows recovery of the spectrum of the supernova. Together these are enough to determine the type of supernova, and perhaps a few details of things like its pre-explosion mass.
[quote="Beyond"]That was a pretty neat video of the reflection, Nereid. It brought to mind a song the Supremes sang about 'reflections'. From what i could make out from the video, It would seem that the supernovae and the reflection are about equal distance from here, and that we are getting the reflection from angled sides of what is doing the reflecting, not like if the reflecting surface was actually behind(farther away)the supernovae, in which case you could actually say the past is being reflected back to us. Of course i might have missed something.Which,alas,is all too common.[/quote]
Glad you liked it Beyond.
Your understanding is correct, in that the dust reflecting the supernova explosion is not behind the supernova, but off to one side. But it's not really a question of being behind vs off to one side; rather that what we see coming from the dust is light that has travelled further - ~400 light-years further - than the x-rays we see from the supernova remnant. If there were suitable clumps of dust ~200 light-years behind the position of the supernova (and just a fraction of a degree off-line), we'd see the same thing (ignoring any relative motion between the dust and the supernova (remnant)).
Also, the dust is not a mirror, so recovering any image from the reflected light would be exceedingly difficult; of course, careful time-lapse records would - or might - allow reconstruction of the light-curve of the supernova (i.e. how bright it was as a function of time), and taking spectra of the reflected light allows recovery of the spectrum of the supernova. Together these are enough to determine the type of supernova, and perhaps a few details of things like its pre-explosion mass.