Located in the binary system T Pyxidis, the white dwarf in question was originally thought to be far more distant from our solar system. Although three thousand light-years might sound like a fairly safe distance away from a potential supernova, it really is quite close by astronomical standards. To put it in some perspective, the diameter of the Milky Way, at roughly 100,000 light-years wide, is multiple orders of magnitude greater than what we're talking about here.

The huge white dwarf in the T Pyxidis system is known as a recurrent nova because it undergoes relatively minor eruptions at regular intervals. Small nova explosions have been observed every twenty years for over a century, although the last recorded nova burst was in 1967. Astronomers are unsure why the star is overdue.

These explosions occur because the white dwarf attracts stray hydrogen gas from its partner star. Once the gas has sufficiently built up, the eruption occurs. The concern for astronomers is whether the amount of hydrogen expelled by the star in these novas is more or less than that originally siphoned off. If more mass is taken in than is ejected, that means the star is slowly increasing in mass and may at some point reach the so-called Chandrasekhar Limit. It is at this point that the white dwarf would collapse in on itself due to its own overwhelming gravitational stress, leading to a massive, Type 1A supernova.

Astronomers have generally said any supernova within a hundred light years would be cataclysmic for Earth, but Pyxidis could be dangerous from even thousands of light-years away. The gamma rays released by a Type 1A supernova at that distance would hit Earth with the force of a thousand solar flares. Most destructively, the rays would create huge amounts of nitrous oxide in the Earth's atmosphere, which would in turn eradicate the Ozone Layer.

Admittedly, on the list of threats to our planet, this one should remain fairly low on the list. The current consensus is that T Pyxidis, if it goes supernova at all, won't explode for some ten million years. By cosmic (and geological) standards, ten million years is practically tomorrow, but it's hard to feel too worried about it if T Pyxidis does go supernova. Even then, it would take three millennia for the radiation to reach Earth. So our descendants 10,000,000 years from now can rest easy too. Although I pity those poor fools 10,003,00 years in the future. Truly, they were the unluckiest of all.

[Space]

In other words, it is emitting only radio waves, and at last astronomers have access to a powerful radio wave detector - the Allen Telescope Array (pictured below) - which allows them to see these previously difficult-to-find astronomical objects.

UC Berkeley astronomer Geoffry Bower, whose paper on the discovery will appear next month in Astronomy and Astrophysics, said:

This supernova is the nearest supernova in five years, yet is completely obscured in optical, ultraviolet and X-rays due to the dense medium of the galaxy.This just popped out; in the future, we want to go from discovery of radio supernovas by accident to specifically looking for them . . . The ATA can detect objects at least 10 times fainter than this radio supernova, which pushes our survey an order of magnitude deeper than other radio surveys with more attention to transient and variable sources. Radio supernovas are a really strong aspect of that survey. This [new radio supernova] is the kind of discovery that we would like to make with the Allen Telescope Array.

The supernova erupted last year in the heart of the M82 galaxy, and has sent out a ring-shaped shockwave that is disturbing the interstellar medium - that ring is about 2,000 astronomical units across. The research team ruled out the possibility that this explosion might be something other than a supernova after examining the ring, and looking back at previous surveys of the galaxy, which revealed that the region had been much brighter last year, and slowly faded in a pattern indicative of a massive explosion.

Using the ATA, scientists hope to detect more of these mysterious, invisible supernovas throughout the universe.

Rare Radio Supernova via Eurekalert!

M82 Image Credit: M. Mountain (STScI), P. Puxley (NSF), J. Gallagher (U. Wisconsin)

The worst space operas are not just campy or silly. They're idiotic and braindead. They're so intent on cramming the cliches of Westerns or adventure serials into an outer-space setting that they not only leave behind even the most basic space science, they actually strip the danger and excitement out of space travel itself. They're usually derivative of better works, and have little undigested chunks of pilfered greatness floating around... like a debris field.

So here are the dumbest space operas of all time, according to us:

Battlestar Galactica (original series.) Sorry. Ron Moore pretty much summed it up when he explained why this version of BSG had so much wasted potential: You have the destruction of an entire civilization in the first episode, and then in the second episode they go to the casino planet and par-tay. Plus the dorky helmets. And the daggit. And Boxey. To be fair, though, this wasn't the dumbest space opera Glen Larson gave us. That honor must go to...

Buck Rogers In The 25th Century. Oh man. We rushed out and bought this on DVD as soon as it came out. And it is just unbelievably atrocious. Like the original BSG, it features a post-apocalyptic setting... which is forgotten right after the first episode. There's Twiki the penis-headed robot, who goes around getting into one hilarious scrap after another, and Princess Ardala, who's always trying to collar the tight-pantsed Buck so he will be her husband/boy-bitch. But mostly, this show is known for its amazing disco set pieces, including this bizarre rock band, Andromeda:

Guardians Of The Galaxy (the original comics). Marvel Comics' answer (sort of) to the Legion of Superheroes, Guardians Of The Galaxy charted the adventures of Vance Astro, who spent 1000 years in suspended animation before arriving at Alpha Centauri and realizing that humans had long since discovered faster-than-light travel. In the mean time, Earth has been invaded, first by Martians and then by the cruel Badoon. So Astro gathers a team of interplanetary misfits to free the Earth. In a typical later storyline, they find Wolverine's metal skeleton still intact (even though Wolverine is long dead) and Wolverine's great-great-granddaughter fights Doctor Doom for it. But Doctor Doom can control the metal skeleton with his mind. Snikkt!

Starslayer. I'm tempted just to say "look at the cover." But if you want more info, here goes. He's a Celtic barbarian, who's about to die in the distant past, but then his wife's descendant, in the distant future, summons him forward in time. Where he frees Earth from some alien invaders, reignites our sun, becomes a space pirate, and then dedicates a black hole to a Celtic goddess. Or something. Oh, just look at the picture.

Warlock. Another weird comic book hero. He's artificially created, his face is so radiant that only blind sculptor Alicia Masters can sculpt it into a human likeness. He gets hold of the Soul Gem, which sounds like the name of a mid-1970s R&B band, and goes around the universe fighting Thanos.

Space: 1999. Okay, I'm fully prepared for some pushback on this one. But even though I love this show, think about it for five seconds. The Moon is blasted away from the Earth at such high speeds that it visits a different planet every week. And somehow this doesn't kill everyone on the Moon, because of their protective Moonbase. Okay. Even though the Moon is hurtling through space at speeds much faster than the speed of light. Also, just how many Eagles do they have? And every planet is like a sillly horror movie or a crazy mind-trip. And then there was the crazy-browed shapeshifter.

The legion of Star Wars ripoffs. Not surprisingly, in the wake of Star Wars' success, a huge wave of incredibly vapid Wars knock-offs flooded theaters, from all over the world. (And we've presented many of them in our regular "found footage" feature.) There were the Italian Star Wars knockoffs, like The Humanoid, Star Odyssey, War Of The Robots and many others. You had your Japanese knock-offs, like Message From Space. There were animated Star Wars fakes, like Starchaser: The Legend Of Orin. And don't forget Galaxina. And of course, Turkish Star Wars. These knockoffs all have one thing in common: they borrow from the trappings of Star Wars, and completely skip over what made the original movie great. It's like a generation of B-movie directors watched only the Star Wars Holiday Special, snorted a mountain of cocaine and crushed Dilaudid, and then fired up the cameras!

Here's the whole thing of War Of The Robots in just ten minutes:

Cosmos: War Of The Planets. This Italian space opera, which came out around the same time as Star Wars, is just sort of brain-dead, with very little direction or originality. Our heroes drift through set-pieces ripped off from 2001 and Barbarella, before coming to a planet ruled by an evil computer. Which they overthrow, of course. It's all thanks to the positive power of red headgear with funny ear-circles. The whole movie is public domain and you can watch the whole thing (if you really want to) online.

Battle Beyond The Stars. It's Roger Corman's space opera, which is really all you need to know. Oh, there's an evil overlord, Sador, and he's going to destory a planet unless they submit to him utterly. And only one plucky young hero (and eventually, his girlfriend) dare to stand up to Sador, stealing an old spaceship and going off to hire some mercenaries to help. Actually, all you really need to know is that there's a spaceship-shooting babe with a ridiculous boob window:

Event Horizon. They travel to the aid of a long-lost spaceship, which turns out to have punched a hole into a universe of pure oatmeal... sorry, I meant pure chaos and pure evil. Not oatmeal, because a universe of pure oatmeal would make no sense whatsoever. Unlike a universe of pure evil, which makes perfect sense. Anyway, it makes them have wacky head trips. Mmmm... Oatmeal...

Supernova: I have to admit, any movie that features James Spader traveling through space naked can't be all bad... but the rest of it? Ugh. There's an alien artifact and a giant star that's about to (you guessed it) go supernova... and everything is messed up, until Spader gets naked again. Why can't he just always be naked?

Solaris (remake). We loved the original Tarkovsky film, but the Soderbergh remake? Just sort of navel-gazey and pointless, with just a few too many trippy moments for trippiness' sake. George Clooney explains it best in this video: "Uh, all sorts of strange things start happening."

Captain Eager. A recent direct-to-DVD British movie about an old space hero who comes out of retirement to save the day one more time, this film sort of rides the line between pastiche, homage and copy, trying to channel Dan Dare and falling a bit flat in the process. Although Tamsin Grieg is great, as always. And we love Scamp the Rocket Dog. Here's the trailer:

The star, which exploded back in 2005, existed in galaxy NGC 266, 200 million light years away. But at this point, scientists aren't entirely sure why it exploded; the star "appeared" healthy, according to San Diego State University's Douglas Leonard:

[The] star when it exploded still had some of its hydrogen envelope. It seems to have exploded before its time... At this point conventional theory doesn't have a good explanation for this.

So did this star die for science? Apparently so, says Stephen Smartt, from the UK's Queen's University Belfast:

I think it's quite an extraordinary discovery... This really does call for us to revisit our models to see if we can get an explosion in this regime.

Rest in peace, star from NGC 266. Your sacrifice was not in vain.

Massive young star explodes 'before its time' [New Scientist]

From yesterday's Associated Press article, which described how NASA's Swift satellite caught the explosion on tape:

On Jan. 9, astronomers used a NASA X-ray satellite to spy on a star already well into its death throes, when another star in the same galaxy started to explode. The outburst was 100 billion times brighter than Earth's sun. The scientists were able to get several ground-based telescopes to join in the early viewing and the first results were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"A star exploded right before my eyes," lead author Alicia Soderberg, an astrophysics researcher at Princeton University, said Wednesday in a teleconference (emphasis ours).

She likened it to "winning the astronomy lottery. We caught the whole thing from start-to-finish on tape."

I love Angela Bassett and her robot both giving the bad guy the finger before they blow him up. And the cool 9th-dimensional-explosion looks pretty awesome. Supernova has some of my favorite VFX work, even if it did get directed into oblivion by a small army, including Francis Ford Coppola in an advisory role.