Talk:History of supernova observation

Removed part
While the following is a very sweet comment, it is quite irrelevant to the subject treated, and belongs in the Guiness Book of World Records instead of here. I have removed it.

"One of the many amateur astronomer looking for supernovae, Caroline Moore, a member of the Puckett Observatory Supernova Search Team, found supernova SN 2008ha late November 2008. At the age of 14 she has now been declared the youngest person ever to find a supernova.  "


 * How is it irrelevant? This is a history article. The statement is both historical and relevant to supernovae discovery.&mdash;RJH (talk) 17:49, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Comment
This article was spawned from the main supernova article in order to reduce the size of the latter. It may be considered a specialized sub-component of the higher-level history of astronomy that focuses on supernovae. Thanks. &mdash; RJH (talk) 18:50, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

GA Nomination
Well, considering this was part of a GA to begin with, it's obviously GA material, but let's go through the criteria anyway.

1. It is well written. pass. Good prose and follows guidlines. 2. It is factually accurate and verifiable. In this respect: pass. very well cited. 3. It is broad in its coverage. In this respect : pass. well explains all supernovae records, contemporary and modern interpretations, and probable remnants. 4. It follows the neutral point of view policy. In this respect:pass. N/A 5. It is stable, pass. 6. It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic. In this respect:pass. Thanatosimii 01:11, 22 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you. Actually it was split off from the SN article before the later reached GA status. &mdash; RJH (talk) 16:12, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Chinese picture.
I remember years and years ago I saw a documentary on BBC1 about stars. One bit of it included a painting a chinese man had done in ancient times of a bright star in the sky that scientist believe is the oldest recorded sighting of a supernova. But I can't find the picture anywhere anymore.... I want to find it for my own personal satisfaction but it'd be cool to put in this article too. Any ideas, supernova people?Simondrake 20:59, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Consistency with other articles
The apparent magnitude and distance for SN 1006 do not seem to match the values given in the article on that supernova. Someone should check the sources of these facts. This article claims a magnitude of -9 and a distance of 4000 light-years, while the SN 1006 article claims -7.5 and 7000 light-years. PSimeon (talk) 19:33, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed the value on this page and provided a reference. But unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem of the remainder of the table entries being unreferenced. I've added a tag and I'll see if it gets referenced. If not, then the table may need to be yanked.&mdash;RJH (talk) 22:14, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
 * The table is a translation of a table from the Dutch article. Possibly some references could be taken from there (Bronnen en nadere informatie). Bamse (talk) 05:11, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
 * The table is not cited on the Dutch article, so that doesn't seem to help.&mdash;RJH (talk) 17:17, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

Discovery of Most Recent Supernova in Our Galaxy
Recent news story about Supernova remnant G1.9+0.3:
 * http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/g19/press_051408.html

&mdash;RJH (talk) 20:33, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Move to History of supernova 'observations'
The move is improper, the singular singular deals with all observation Kja er (talk) 14:16, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * That works for me. Thanks.&mdash;RJH (talk) 17:33, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

No longer GA
To me, the improperly cited "Some historical supernovae" means this page does not satisfy GA criteria. It think that needs to be addressed, either by citing the table, removing it, or else delisting this page.&mdash;RJH (talk) 17:34, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Unsourced material MAY be challenged and removed. The proper way to proceed here would be to assume good fdaith on the part of prior editors, tag undocumented items, attempt to document them, and to remove them only if no documentation is possible. I am not an expert, do not have access to a university library, and am simply not inclined to spend the time providing references for material that others have added. But it is a simple matter to check any doubtful entires for obvious falsehood. Yesterday I removed a listing for a "bafegox" which was described as a "planet known to the Mayans." There was no mention except wikipedia, and it turns out that the only hits for "bafegox" were someone's username. The same can be done here. For example, a google search for "coma berenices 1940b" gives several mentions external to WP including Cambridge University Press. Were this a controversial article or were the items listed obviously vanity edits by trolls it would make sense to remove them. But given the obvious correctness of several listings, unless an expert with personal knowledge knows better, or an editor has challenged an individual entry and found it baseless, it should be left stand with a citation necessary tag. Further additions can be stopped if they are added without citation. Reasonable? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kjaer (talk • contribs) 19:51, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Assuming good faith is okay in general for an article, but not in the case of a GA rating. Per Good_article_criteria: "A good article ... provides references to all sources of information". Ergo, this article no longer satisfies the GA criteria. The warning template has been up since February, which is more than enough time to get it cited.&mdash;RJH (talk) 13:33, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I resolved my concern by moving the table to another page (as recommended by Splitting), where it can be expanded and improved. Thanks.&mdash;RJH (talk) 13:45, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
 * A very reasonable solution. Kja er (talk) 18:38, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Least Luminous Supernova
I removed the line about SN2008ha being the "least luminous" supernova discovered. While the source DOES state this, it's not clear that they're correct. For example, see Kowalski et al 2008 ApJ 686 749-778, Table 11, which lists dozens of supernova below 18.2 (down to mid 20s even). Of course, they could mean Absolute magnitude, but they're not clear. --Falcorian (talk) 03:19, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Absolute magnitude does appear to be what the published papers are claiming. --Falcorian (talk) 22:23, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Technologies of supernova observation?
Would such a subject be better written as a list with wikilinks to primary articles, a normally written section, an independent article or not at all?Trilobitealive (talk) 01:10, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * If you want to work on it, then really it's up to you. But personally, I think a new article may be best. Once it is developed, we can include a summary-style (WP:SS) section in, say, the supernova article. A shorter article can readily be merged into a longer article at a later date.&mdash;RJH (talk) 21:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback.Trilobitealive (talk) 00:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

NASA'S Chandra Finds Youngest Nearby Black Hole
An object which is believed to be a remnant of supernova SN 1979C has been found 50 million light years away. Perhaps this will be a good fit for this article? http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_10-299_CHANDRA.html DavidR2010 (talk) 18:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)DavidR2010

This might be a great addition to the 2000 to present section. Possibly worded like this.

"Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth. Data from Chandra, NASA's Swift satellite, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and the German ROSAT observatory revealed a bright source of X-rays that has remained steady during observation from 1995 to 2007. This suggests the object is a black hole being fed either by material falling into it from the supernova or a binary companion.

Although the evidence points to a newly formed black hole in SN 1979C, another intriguing possibility is that a young, rapidly spinning neutron star with a powerful wind of high energy particles could be responsible for the X-ray emission. This would make the object in SN 1979C the youngest and brightest example of such a "pulsar wind nebula" and the youngest known neutron star. The Crab pulsar, the best-known example of a bright pulsar wind nebula, is about 950 years old."

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_10-299_CHANDRA.html

How does this look? DavidR2010 (talk) 19:03, 16 November 2010 (UTC)DavidR2010
 * Hello David. There's just a couple of minor issues: the use of second-person "our" is somewhat frowned upon per the Manual of Style. Also the word "intriguing" is expressing a personal opinion, which is usually deemed non-encyclopedic unless it is in a quote. Otherwise, although it could probably be trimmed down a little to appear more summary-style, it seems fine to me. Thank you.&mdash;RJH (talk) 16:49, 18 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Well This is just quotes I took from the article should I work on summarizing it? DavidR2010 (talk) 17:25, 18 November 2010 (UTC)DavidR2010
 * If it is taken directly from the article, there may be an issue of Copyright violations which can result in the material being removed. It's usually better to reword the content sufficiently to avoid that problem. Sorry this has to be so difficult.&mdash;RJH (talk) 17:28, 18 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Its ok I had concerns about that which is Why I used edit request however if this is the right place for this information I will write a reword here first. DavidR2010 (talk) 17:32, 18 November 2010 (UTC)DavidR2010

For the 2000 to present section http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_10-299_CHANDRA.html


 * Nov. 15, 2010 NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory announced that while viewing the remnant of SuperNova 1979C in the galaxy of M100 they have discovered an object which could be a young black hole. Nasa also noted the possibility this object could be a spinning neutron star producing a wind of high energy particles. DavidR2010 (talk) 19:15, 18 November 2010 (UTC)DavidR2010
 * Thank you. I inserted the paragraph with some minor tweaks. Hope those are okay. It is linked to the supernova article so that the reader will be able to go there to read more. Thanks again for the addition.&mdash;RJH (talk) 22:53, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Change in date format
With these edits, user Thorwald revised the date format on the page with no suitable explanation. I reverted, but user Thorwald undid my revert with the claim that "Articles about astronomy observe the convention of international date formats". I've been with the Astronomy wikiprojects for many years and I have seen no such consensus. As I could find nothing about this in the WP:MoS, I reverted under WP:DATERET. If I am in error, please demonstrate with the appropriate passage in the MoS, or else bring it up for discussion in Wikipedia_Talk:WikiProject Astronomy. Thank you.&mdash;RJH (talk) 16:09, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
 * On one hand, we have Wikipedia formatting dates (in signatures, for example) as we can read in your signature above, viz. 6 January 2011. There is also the ISO way of writing a date, but this is only in numbers, and not full month name: 2011-01-06 (always year-month-day). Otherwise, I have never seen any standard per se. CielProfond (talk) 00:04, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Could we please use international date standards that 96% of the world's population uses instead of imposing US date formats on non-US-related articles? The convention I was referring to was, indeed, non-Wikipedia-related. However, note that Wikipedia guidelines are not rules, just guidelines that have found a consensus amongst some users. Anyway, DATERET reads that one should not change date formats "unless there are reasons for changing it based on strong national ties to the topic". Here we could read that as the USA is the only country in the world with "strong national ties" for this article to use a (nonsensical) date format and, therefore, there are very good reasons for a non-US-related article to not use US date formats. I call on all internationally minded Wikipedians to vote in favour of using international date formats in this article. --Thorwald (talk) 00:53, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry but I have to disagree. Completely. If you have an issue with how articles are dated, you should take it up with policy. This really isn't the place to do it, and you seem to be getting close to WP:POINT. Please, would you kindly take the general subject of date formats to Manual of Style (dates and numbers) and get a consensus there? If you can get a consensus on his format, then I'll be glad to see the page format changed.


 * Your point about the US having "strong national ties" to the topic of supernovae is stretching things way too far. To me it is bordering on being offensive; please, astronomy is an international science. Supernovae observations have been made since the ancient Chinese astronomers first recorded such an event. It's hardly a U.S.-specific topic. In any event, pleading that DATEREF supports your case seems hypocritical since you were the first to break it.
 * "The date format chosen by the first major contributor in the early stages of an article should continue to be used, unless there is reason to change it based on strong national ties to the topic."
 * &mdash;RJH (talk) 17:50, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You completely mis-understood what I was saying (this might partially be my fault for not being clear). I was saying that since this article has absolutely zero "strong national ties" to the USA (or anything whatsoever to do with the USA), we should use international date formats, not US ones. I believe DATEREF, thereby, supports my claims and the date format should be changed to use international ones. You haven't given a good reason as to why this article should use US date formats, other than "that's the way it always have been". Not good enough and no consensus has been reached, so I will revert back to my edit. Note that every time you revert my edits, you are also removing other information that has nothing to do with date formats. --Thorwald (talk) 04:17, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Well my apologies for misinterpreting your statement then. But I still believe you are in the wrong. I understand you have an issue with the date format, but this isn't the place to resolve it. There is nothing in the policy that says we should use international dates for non-national article. You are applying your personal beliefs here, rather than policy.


 * (a) There is nothing in DATEREF that says international dates should be used if there are no national ties. (b) I quoted DATEREF above that says the dates should retain the original date format. I created and wrote most of this article and they were the original dates I used. You keep changing from that date format, so you are clearly not following DATEREF. Perhaps you misinterpreted the quote? It seems clear enough.


 * It is not clear to me how we can ever reach consensus on this issue since our viewpoints are utterly incompatible. So I will attempt to recruit some other editors to share their viewpoint.


 * I restored the non-date related information you added in my last revert, so that has not been lost. Thanks.&mdash;RJH (talk) 15:31, 10 January 2011 (UTC)


 * In short, RJHall is right. The Wikipedia manual of style regards the day-first format and the month-first format as equally good, so if the article does not have strong ties to a particular nation, the format is decided by the first major contributor. Also, the claim that 96 percent of the world's population uses an international date format is plainly wrong, because the majority of the world's population does not use English as their first language. Indeed, I do not believe that any date format, in any language, is used by a majority of the world's population. (By the way, I consider each set of spelling for month names to be a distinct standard.) Jc3s5h (talk) 19:47, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Nowhere near 96% (click and scroll down to see what the colors mean). Also, many countries such as Germany use periods. Art LaPella (talk) 22:52, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I guess I wasn't clear by what I meant by "international date formats". I wasn't talking about the language or the punctuation/separators (I actually thought it would be obvious I wasn't referring to that). I meant that most of the world follows the (logical) order of day, month, then year (dd-mm-yyyy; or the reverse). The USA is one of the only (according to your map, PI and Kenya as well) that use (the illogical) month, day, year (mm-dd-yyyy). I was not referring to the language they are written in, rather to the order (small date-range, "day", to larger, "month", to largest, "year"). If one considers that, then the vast majority of people on the planet would write their date as day, month, year (using various punctuation or separator differences and in their local language). Anyway, I didn't think this would become such a big deal with my first edit. I have a thing about dates and standards, and I wish all articles (not specifically related to the USA) would use the international norm of day, month year. --Thorwald (talk) 05:05, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That's almost correct if European and Latin American dd-mm-yyyy and East Asian yyyy-mm-dd are considered more interchangeable than U.S. mm-dd-yyyy. Art LaPella (talk) 07:24, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I am not sure I follow your logic there? --Thorwald (talk) 09:42, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The quote was "Could we please use international date standards that 96% of the world's population uses instead of imposing US date formats on non-US-related articles?" The only way to add up to 96% is to lump together dd-mm-yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd countries worldwide, without including the U.S. (and often Canadian, and sometimes even UK) format mm-dd-yyyy. That seems inconsistent with the quote, as dd-mm-yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd can't be used simultaneously. That's all. Art LaPella (talk) 23:27, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * An article doesn't have to have strong national ties to a variant of English to be written in that variant of English. This particular article (as opposed to, say, an article about Canberra or Queen Victoria or George Washington) can be said to be fair game.  What that means, though, is not that we must choose the most international system possible but rather that it is equally valid to write the article in any of the standard English variants. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:58, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
 * So, by that logic, if I started an article on, say, Yosemite National Park (a very US-specific article) but only used the metric system throughout, then I could revert any future edits by other editors wishing to change from the metric system to the US-one (Imperial?) . . . just because I got there first?! Note that we are not talking about a "variant of English" here. --Thorwald (talk) 05:05, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * See Manual of style (dates and numbers) and you will find that ordinarily metric and US customary should be provided in any article, but if the article is strongly associated with the US the US customary units should be stated first. Jc3s5h (talk) 05:42, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I knew someone was going to point that out (use of both metrics) and I was almost going to mention that caveat. However, I still think my point remains that it is rather silly to say that just because one editor "got there first", his or her preferred date format should become the norm/standard of that article. It seems fairly clear to me that everyone else in the world uses either the ascending or descending orders of magnitudes with respect to date formats, so why should we impose a US-specific (and illogical) one on non-US-related articles just because some editor "got there first"? --Thorwald (talk) 09:42, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, a benefit of the policy is to avoid these types of circular policy discussions for every article. By having discussions such as this on the style guide talk page, you can try to gain a wider acceptance and let people get on with more useful editing. Otherwise you just end up knocking heads to no good purpose.&mdash;RJH (talk) 15:39, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

A new twist. I decided to use the official templates for "cite"-something (using the |day= |month= |year= tags) and user "Jc3s5h" decided to "warn" me. That is not appropriate. I have been an editor for over 6 years on Wikipedia. That is not the way we do things around here. --Thorwald (talk) 16:21, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The template instructions for Cite conference do not list a day parameter, and in any case, we all know this is a transparent pretense to defy the manual of style. I will not now report this at WP:ANI Administrators' noticeboard/Edit warring. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:29, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I have to concur. I know you're an experienced editor Thorwald, but sometimes we all need to step away for a bit and get some perspective. Thank you.&mdash;RJH (talk) 18:14, 11 January 2011 (UTC)

Future additions

 * The supernova explosion that formed the Gum Nebula most likely occurred 10,000–20,000 years ago. In 1972, NASA astronomers suggested that inhabitants of the southern hemisphere may have witnessed this explosion and recorded it symbolically. A year later, archaeologist George Michanowsky recalled some incomprehensible ancient markings in Bolivia that were left by Native Americans. The carvings showed four small circles flanked by two larger circles. The smaller circles resemble stellar groupings in the constellations Vela and Carina. One of the larger circles may represent the star Capella. The other circle is located near the position of the supernova remnant, so George Michanowsky suggested this may represent the supernova explosion as witnessed by the indigenous residents.


 * The first astronomer to propose the use of supernovae for determining the red shift of a distant galaxy was Olin C. Wilson of Mount Wilson Observatory. In 1939 he noted that the light curves of supernovae are very similar to each other and they also showed a similar spectrum, suggesting that they were nearly identical events.


 * By 1988, the process of supernova discovery was beginning to be fully automated. A computer controlled telescope observed hundreds of galaxies each night, with a charge coupled device being used to collect the image and a computer processed the data as it arrived. A configuration such as this discovered its first supernova in 1986. However, a problem with this approach are false-positives from background events, which require an astronomer to vet each candidate. More sophisticated software needed to be developed to reduce the number of false detections.


 * In 1938, Zwicky's colleague Walter Baade Baade became the first astronomer to identify a nebula as a supernova remnant when he suggested that the Crab Nebula was the remains of SN 1054. He note that, while it had the appearance of a planetary nebula, the measured velocity of expansion was much too large to belong to that classification.


 * Baade first proposed the use of the Type Ia supernova as a secondary distance indicator in 1938. Later, the work of Allan Sandage and Gustav Tammann helped refine the process so that Type Ia supernovae became a type of standard candle for measuring large distances across the cosmos.


 * The rate of supernova discovery steadily increased during the twentieth century. In the 1990s, several automated supernova search programs were initiated. The Leuschner Observatory Supernova Search program was began in 1992 at Leuschner Observatory. It was joined the same year by the Berkeley Automated Imaging Telescope program. These were succeeded in 1996 by the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope at Lick Observatory, which was primarily used for the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS). By 2000, the Lick program resulted in the discovery of 96 supernovae, making it the world's most successful Supernova search program.


 * The idea that a past supernova could be studied by means of the light echo off the surrounding interstellar medium was made by Zwicky in 1940, then first attempted by Sidney van den Bergh in 1965. Three such light echoes were reported by Armin Rest et al. in 2005, and the emissions allowed the astronomers to categorize the supernova type. Similar echo features have since been detected from SN 1572 and Cassiopeia A.

&mdash;RJH (talk) 16:07, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
 * The editing seems to have stabilized a bit, so I am going to start moving these into the main article. Hope that's okay.&mdash;RJH (talk) 23:03, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Annales Cambriae
Exact dating is problematic (the list of dates of unverified observations given here seem overly specific as well, btw) but the B text of the Welsh chronicles lists A star is seen shining with amazing greatness by the whole world for an entry within 30 or so years of AD 645. Another states The rise of a star around 618. — Llywelyn II   10:43, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

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Cassiopeia A
I don’t understand why this paragraph “Although no supernova has been observed in the Milky Way since 1604, it appears that a supernova exploded in the constellation Cassiopeia about 300 years ago, around the year 1667 or 1680. The remnant of this explosion, Cassiopeia A—is heavily obscured by interstellar dust, which is possibly why it did not make a notable appearance. However it can be observed in other parts of the spectrum, and it is currently the brightest radio source beyond our solar system” appears in the 1970-1999 section. What observation/discovery was made in this time period? EighteenFiftyNine (talk) 23:32, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

First 'confirmation'
I am just wondering what that means. The section in question states:

"These observations are consistent with the appearance of a supernova, and this is believed to be the oldest confirmed record of a supernova event by humankind. SN 185 may have also possibly been recorded in Roman literature, though no records have survived.[3] The gaseous shell RCW 86 is..."

I changed it ["the oldest confirmed record of a supernova event by civilization, but not humankind..."] because I assume many societies have witnessed supernovae throughout humanity's history, so the wording is kind of bad. There's no reason not to posit the infered facticity of prehistoric people's astronomical observations. However, I welcome people countering my edit. Dudanotak (talk) 08:31, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Inconsistent era style
Hello. The article is currently inconsistent between AD and CE. This needs to be amended. I do not know what the original era style was. StephenMacky1 (talk) 12:23, 17 July 2024 (UTC)