
Caught for the First Time: The Early Flash of an Exploding Star - ezequiel-garzon
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/Kepler/caught-for-the-first-time-the-early-flash-of-an-exploding-star
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losvedir
Worth pointing out that the cool gif and video are just illustrations. I'm not
sure what was actually "captured" when it happened. Maybe the chart on the
side of the page which shows the spike in brightness?

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danparsonson
Yes the chart is what they captured; the animation is inferred from the data
and our current models of supernovae.

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mkagenius
That breaks my heart :(

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imglorp
Recently we have started to see actual pictures (ie, not a point) of
extrasolar stars. The keyword when searching is direct imaging.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=direct+imaging+betelgeuse&t=ffsb&i...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=direct+imaging+betelgeuse&t=ffsb&iax=1&ia=images)

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danparsonson
Indeed, see also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL_Tauri](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL_Tauri)
and [http://www.space.com/31497-exoplanets-direct-imaging-next-
bi...](http://www.space.com/31497-exoplanets-direct-imaging-next-big-
thing.html)

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ezequiel-garzon
If I understand correctly, this data was recorded in 2011. It amazes me that
it could take NASA this long to sift through its own (massive) data. As
datasets are getting ever larger (outpacing gains in computing power, I feel)
I wonder if some similar discoveries will take decades (centuries?) in the
future.

Does anybody know if these teams make it a point to keep datasets "small
enough" to be manageable in reasonable time frames?

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cyphar
It should be noted that NASA makes essentially all of it's data public. In the
astrophysics community, this means that researchers write scripts to run over
all of the data for exploratory research and then do more complicated analysis
later. It's also important to note that one of the best and most accurate
space telescopes ever made (Kepler) was keeping the entire photometric
community very busy.

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ezequiel-garzon
Thanks for your comment! Do you feel that, in the medium term, as ever larger
datasets are generated the overall computing power will be unable to catch up?

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cyphar
To be quite frank, the limiting factor is not computing power, it's code
written by physicists. I'm a software developer by trade, and it's sometimes
painful to see the type of code my supervisors write. I get the feeling that
"our simulation takes half an hour" is acceptable and they won't try to
optimise it unless they're near a deadline.

Obviously, that's not deriding them, they have much better things to do than
to micro-optimise their code. But in general I prefer writing all of my
analysis scripts from scratch after discussing what methods they used. :P

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jkot
It is a quite impressive. Kepler is pointed towards Milky Way disc and those
stars are in other galaxy.

