New? Pfft barely refurbished if you ask me.
Astronomers are expecting a “new star” to appear in the night sky anytime between now and September in a celestial event that has been years in the making, according to NASA.
I mean, no. It hasn’t been years in the making, it happened a very, very long time ago. We just don’t get to see it until now.
It’s more that we’ve been anticipating the event for years.
This is saying good morning to everyone at midnight levels of pedantic. Astronomers need a common reference frame for discussing timing, and the reference frame they use is “when it’s observed at Earth”.
Because nothing else allows for coherent organization, discussion, or education.
A nuclear fusion event occurred in the accretion disk of a stellar remnant 2600 years ago or so. An astronomical event known as a nova will occur in the sky sometime this summer.
Read up on reference frames.
Discussing astronomical events would be incredibly tedious if we had to qualify everything by how many light years away / how long ago the light we’re measuring was created.
Put another way - everyone already knows we’re looking at the past, it’s like saying the sky is blue.
This has always confused me, but reference frames makes conceptual sense to me.
Even still, I like to think about how long ago what I’m seeing now actually occurred.
For example when we see a planet in our solar system in the sky we know it’s still technically in the past, but it’s still in timescales humans can relate to.
Yes, and if you want to take it to pedantic extremes, EVERYTHING you see is in the past because it takes at least 13ms for your eyes to transmit signals to your brain, and your brain to interpret the signals. (This is based on recent research from MIT but it’s far from definitive, point being it takes time for our meat computers to interpret reality) That’s why the whole argument is a bit silly.
Astronomy is just that, adding orders of magnitude the further away something is.
I’m in agreement with you, cause even with the eye/brain processing time, you still have the time for light to reflect off whatever you’re seeing and hit your eyes. So there’s definitely some delays.
I think the interesting part for me, is when the orders of magnitude make a difference on the human scale
The few milliseconds it takes light to reflect and my brain to process it is not really tangible, but knowing that this nova in OP occurred thousands of years ago and is just reaching out eyes now is worth noting, IMO.
Our receipt of the photons is what we’re concerned with, and that has indeed been years in the making.
You must be really fun at parties.
a very, very long time ago
Some precision here would be appreciated
This binary system, T. Coronae Borealis, is 2500 light years away. That means the event we’re about to witness actually occurred 2500 years ago, and the light that it emitted is just about to reach our solar system.
Years in the making is correct. Whether it’s 5 years or 5 billion years, that’s years in the making.
