by iamlucky13 » Tue Oct 16, 2007 11:48 pm
The blotch is there, but dimmer, apparently another star. If you compare all the stars in the before and after, you will notice the after image is dimmer. I don't know what the perceived tail is, but my best guess is a compression artifact or random noise. I'm not sure whether that background fuzz is noise or fainter stars.
The star that caused SN2005ap would not have been visible before the supernova. Assuming the red-shift distance method is correct, it's 5 billion light years away. Individual stars become impossible to distinguish with our best telescopes at distances even a small fraction of that (some where on the order of 100,000 LY, I think). Even a long Hubble exposure would have only faintly showed the galaxy the source star resides in. In fact, it seems this single star briefly outshone its entire parent galaxy.
The blotch is there, but dimmer, apparently another star. If you compare all the stars in the before and after, you will notice the after image is dimmer. I don't know what the perceived tail is, but my best guess is a compression artifact or random noise. I'm not sure whether that background fuzz is noise or fainter stars.
The star that caused SN2005ap would not have been visible before the supernova. Assuming the red-shift distance method is correct, it's 5 billion light years away. Individual stars become impossible to distinguish with our best telescopes at distances even a small fraction of that (some where on the order of 100,000 LY, I think). Even a long Hubble exposure would have only faintly showed the galaxy the source star resides in. In fact, it seems this single star briefly outshone its entire parent galaxy.