- Hi,
-
- I'm Karin, the one quoted in this article as having discovered
the supernova progenitor. I just wanted to let you all know to pay very
little attention to the article. The reporter has taken one fact: that
this might be a good candidate for a Type Ia supernova, and constructed
a big mess out of it. I am very embarassed by this so I just wanted to
clear up a few things.
-
- First, I did NOTHING in the discovery process. I was
just writing my senior thesis on white dwarfs and happened to study this
system. It was discovered in 1993 by two separate groups of scientists
(Landsman et al 1993, and Wonnacott et al 1993) They found the mass to
be 1.15 solar masses, which is relatively large for a white dwarf star,
but not the "just shy" of the Chandrasekhar limit that the reporter
says. It is 0.3 times the mass of the sun shy of the limit, and that is
a lot of mass. Lots and lots of people have studied this system since then,
and many have commented on its possibilities for a supernova. All that
I did in this story is to mention the system to a scientist here at Harvard
who happens to simulate the evolution of a binary system towards a supernova
and then mention in in a public talk about my thesis when a New Scientist
reporter happened to be in the audience. The reporter got very excited
and wrote this article, and left out the actual work that is being done
on the evolutionary scenarios to sensationalize the possibility of a near
earth supernova.
-
- Second, what we have found, if anything, is that by the
time that the white dwarf star has accreted enough mass from its companion
to exceed the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses, it will be at least
10 kiloparsecs from earth, which is well on its way to the other side of
the galaxy. The star will not pose any threat at all to earth. This is
also hundreds of millions to billions of years in the future. I think the
interesting part of this story is the terrible state of scientific news
reporting in some popular journals. We discussed these problems extensively
with the reporter and they were completely disregarded in the final version.
Be on the lookout for our letter to the editor if you are interested. If
anyone would like to know more about this, I'd be happy to explain what
we really think is going on...unless you are a reporter, in which case
don't bother...I'm done with them.
-
- Thanks, Karin Sandstrom
-
- As Posted on Slashdot: News For Nerds - Stuff That Matters
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33072&cid=3574598
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