Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterM
Hi Scott,
Supernova hunting the LMC & SMC, naked eye and with binoculars.
You would need to familiarise yourself with the LMC & SMC, get to know them really, really well.
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Gday there, Pete,
"Long time no see" in the virtual sense, as I have mainly been doing geology and other sciences , for the last year. (and committing astro-heresy by looking mainly through the microscope!)
I think that we would both rate the odds of finding an SN as being much much better in a large and massive spiral galaxy with many giant HII regions and large numbers of OB stars, such as M101 and M61.
However, I do take your point:
surveying the LMC night after night, while it will result - nearly always - in
non-detection of Supernova, is the sort of thing that amateurs can easily do;
the odds of success are very small, but.......
if you do succeed, then you get a halo of eternal glory!!
Instead of spending my time looking at dwarf or low-mass galaxies, if I wanted to maximise my chance of discovering supernovae, I would probably look at galaxies like M83, night after night;
M83 has a globally-elevated rate of star formation, and a rich population of massive stars. It even has young globular-like star clusters of over 100,000 solar masses each, ready to produce multiple SNe.
Also, there are a few nearby Small Galaxies which do genuinely host such a vigorous burst of star formation that they match big galaxies for their theoretical rate of core-collapse supernovae. One thinks of IC 10, M82, and NGC 1313.
(NGC1313 has a population of massive stars that is as large as that of big spiral, despite being a noticeably smaller galaxy)
If I can ever "get a round tuit", I can probably come up with a list of those galaxies within 50 million light years that have the highest star formation rates, and therefore the highest chances of hosting core-collapse supernovae.
Best regards,
Robert Cosmo Lang
(did you know that there was an archbishop of Canterbury who was actually called Cosmo Lang !!)
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P.S.
I am given to understand that the Current total Star Formation Rate of the LMC is only 0.4 (or thereabouts) solar masses per annum. ((see:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1422v1.pdf
))
This compares with 2 solar masses per annum for our own Milky Way Galaxy.
This does suggest to me that the rate of core-collapse supernovae is going to be modest in the LMC.
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