BAN #387: COINCIDENCE? (yes), Watch a supernova expand in front of your eyes

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Subscribers are also the best people on Earth. COINCIDENCE? (no)

Apropos of nothing

Not everything needs to be themed

I am sometimes reminded of why so many people believe in the paranormal.

Over the holiday I was perusing social media and saw the usual discussion about whether “Die Hard’ is a Christmas movie or not. I was chuckling as I read it, since it’s an inherently funny conversation, and generally devolves into people throwing out movies that take place in winter or just mention Christmas once and asking if those are Christmas movies then, which I find to be silly.

This was on December 22 or so, as I recall, and a funny thought popped into my head, a joke I could make. I didn’t want to tweet it then, so I made a mental note to tweet it on Christmas day. So I waited, and (a holiday miracle) I actually remembered to tweet it:

I do enjoy a deeply nerdy tongue-in-cheek trolling.

I got some fun comments on it (this was my favorite, because it’s beautifully subtle), but then I got this one:

Holy wow. Ben Lesnick made almost exactly the same joke literally less than a day earlier! Look at the phrasing, too!

My first thought was, yegads what a coincidence. But my second thought was, uh oh. Did I see this joke and accidentally steal it?

I’ve written about this before; I wrote almost an entire blog post plagiarizing myself about the La Palma volcano. Literally, I wrote a post about it, searched my blog for a photo of the volcano to reuse, saw that I had written about the volcano before, and then saw that the two articles were eerily similar. I had totally forgotten I had written the first one. Well, consciously forgotten, so it was hiding around in my synapses somewhere.

Could I have seen that earlier tweet, forgotten it, and then had it pop into my head like it was my idea? That seemed unlikely, given it was posted only the day before mine, but I was curious. I checked, and no one I follow retweeted it, and so it seems extremely unlikely I stole it. I have to think instead that this is a case of a bizarre coincidence.

These coincidences happen, and when they happen on a personal level it can feel like defying the odds to such a measure that maybe, maaaaaaybe, something supernatural was at play. Our brains have evolved over a long time to connect things together, while understanding the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is not something that comes naturally (though a statistics class can help). So we struggle to find meaning and connection when most of the time we should shrug our shoulders and just think, “Eh, coincidence”.

Well, after checking to see if it really was. That only seems fair.

I’m glad Ben Lesnick agrees with me, too:

Two last points.

1) Ironically, I was sure I had written on this topic before in the newsletter but I can’t find it. Haha! Ha! Grrrr. Also, did you know you can search the newsletter?

b) So what’s my take on “Die Hard”? It is not about Christmas, but it has strong Christmassy themes. And, since we don’t really have a good definition of what makes a Christmas movie a Christmas movie, I think it counts as one. Also, Pluto is a Christmas movie.

Yippee-ki-yay.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[Obviously the biggest astro news of the week, and also maybe 2021. From Friday’s article. Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez]

Monday 20 December, 2021: Big baby planet found orbiting small baby star. Here's why that's a problem.

Tuesday 21 December, 2021: The last spring of the dinosaurs

Wednesday 22 December, 2021: Dozens of rogue planets found in a nearby cosmic nursery

Thursday 23 December, 2021: Two monster black holes roar, carve out enormous cavities around them

Friday 24 December, 2021: After decades of anticipation, James Webb Space Telescope launches tomorrow

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

Oh, you’ve seen tons of astrophotography from my friend Adam Block before (like here, here, here, here, and a zillion times on the blog). He is a talented image processor and has access to a terrific professional telescope on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona which maybe helps a bit too.

[The Crab Nebula, a millennium-old supernova remnant. Credit: Adam Block /Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona]

He just released a new image, this time of the Crab Nebula, one of the most celebrated and best studied objects in the sky. It’s a supernova remnant, the expanding debris from a massive star that exploded, its light reaching us in the year 1054 after travelling 6,500 light years. Since then the blasted-out outer layers of the star have expanded to a size of 13 light years or so, and it’s still bright enough to be visible in binoculars from a dark site.

That image is cool, but this gets WAY cooler: He took similar images in 1999 and 2012. Over those two decades, the gaseous debris has expanded noticeably. The outer filaments are moving at over 1,000 kilometers per second, so even from all that distance we can see their movement even over relatively short time periods.

He created a video describing this and showing the expansion:

Whoa. That’s so cool. He also has a video without the extra narration, if you prefer.

If you want more details, I wrote about this exact phenomenon when astrophotographer Detlef Hartmann published a similar video taken over the time range 2008 – 2017; the images are a bit lower resolution but he took every year so the expansion appears smoother:

You can also see waves expanding outward from the center, caused by a wind of subatomic particles from the pulsar at the heart of the nebula.

The Crab is in the constellation of Taurus, located near one star marking the end of the bull’s horns. It’s not too hard to find if you have a good set of binocs or a small telescope (here’s a finder chart). Taurus is already rising in the east after sunrise for those of us north of the equator, so if you have the right equipment, take a look for it!

We know a lot about this nebula now, so if you can see it, take a moment to read more about it. I love writing about things I personally have seen through the eyepiece, and I hope you enjoy reading about them, too.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!