A big announcement of 50 years in the making would be actual water on Mars or proof of life SOMEWHERE!

What will they call an actual discovery of life when we find it?? A Jumbo announcement?

I was all excited, got my WIFE all excited about Space stuff for a change……… Now I have to hope she forgets I mentioned it and never have to tell her what they thought was big.
I'd rather not get THAT tone of eye, if you know what I mean

Wouldn't the time frame of actual supernova explosion be exactly 25 thousand one hundred and forty years ago- ISH????

That said, still an anti-climax.

I wish it had been my second guess though, imaging the accretion disk on Cygnus X-1, that would have been a MUCH bigger boost to astronomy!

Considering that probably 90% of the public have little or no idea of what a star even is, I would think that there would be maybe 0.1% or less of the public that had some idea of what a supernovae is.

It really is an impressive find though. It will provide an excellent laboratory for testing models of supernovae and many other aspects of physics such as plasma astrophysics and whatnot. Many interesting phenomena occur at the shock boundaries of supernovae, so it'll be great to see what science comes out of this object in the future.

Maybe NASA need to realise that people just don't give a s__t unless the announcement concerns either aliens, or something with a spooky and sinister name like dark energy, or dark matter, or 'killer black hole', or perhaps 'mega-super-killer asteroid'.

If it is 25000 LY away, then doesnt that mean that the explosion actually happened, not 140 years ago, but 140+25000 years ago?

The paper I stumbled across was actually this one:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.1487

which was submitted to the Letters of the Astrophysical Journal (and posted on the arXiv) on the 10th of MARCH!!

It even states in the title that they found the youngest SNR in our galaxy.

So somehow this is… old news.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2317

I had stumbled across this WEEKS ago already and thought it was very welcome and interesting news from the purely scientific point of view, but nothing to shake the normal public… (Definitely much less spectacular then the "naked-eye" GRB 080319B!)

I did wonder a bit about a missing press release. And I completely missed the original UT announcement of the upcoming big NASA PR 5 days ago. Even if I had read it, I propbably would NOT have thought of the young SN, as I too would have expected something MUCH more spectacular.

Therefore, I must join the chorus: Booh, NASA, what a wet firecracker!!!

And here I was thinking that "my" ESA was *the* PR disaster in the space industry…

He he he…

I'm not surprised we're not seeing them…

You people didnt really expect N.A.S.A. to have anything amazing to say did you?

They dont do nothing but gaze at space dust, specks of light, dream up an idea of whats going on, then hype everyone up with something like this on line.

The extent of their space program has been nothing more then a flying can around the edge of the Earths atmosphere a few laps then crash land almost in the desert or ocean.

Once apon a time, they sent a few tuna cans with people packed in them, to the moon for a few hours.

Soon there will be less then that in 2010. Sence then, N.A.S.A. has been nothing more then the same old general run of the mill, mundain dust puff chasers as always.