That does inded help, thanks Astroboy14 and Angua. 
No worries.
By the by, I don’t see any reason we have to spoiler any Qs or As here…
Well… points at Kid_A… he started it…
:grumble: just trying to be considerate…never going to try that again.
Why is it IRL I can never get people to follow me this well?
Thanks for the explanations, I was pretty confused as to what all of this meant.
So wait… why did they say we’ve been looking for this for the last 50 years?
Beer to whoever said it’d be a supernove, despite all the logic that it wouldn’t be.
blush He taught me for a long time when I was an undergrad and we bump into each other fairly regularly at conferences.
No problem mlees. And seconded re not needing spoilers!
I suppose its the entire “trying to find a supernova in our galaxy that’s younger than Cassiopeia A” which is about 300 years old, and was discovered in 1947.
Q: Why the hype?
A: To get, and keep, the public interested in space exploration, and increased funding for these programs.
Q: Why isn’t the public interested in space exploration?
A: Too many times has the reveal not lived up to the hype.
It seems like a self fulfilling prophecy. heh.
A good, “easy for the layman to understand” write-up by the Bad Astronomer
Bad Astonomer’s explanation is excellent. Except that in comparing two images taken 23 years, he makes me wonder why, when it was seen in 1985, astronomers didn’t figure that it was a supernova then. Is the big deal that we’ve noticed growth? Why wasn’t it noticed before this?
They probably recognized it as a supernova, but it took the visible expansion to show it was as young as it is.
Well, it was seen and noticed as a supernova in 1985 (the technical name G1.9+03 refers, I believe to its numbering in the Green Catalog of Supernova Remnants). What wasn’t known was how old it is. When Reynolds et al looked at the Chandra X-ray image, they noticed that the X-ray extent of the remnant was larger than the radio remnant observed in 1985, thus clearly having expanded in the meantime (at any given point the X-ray and radio should be roughly the same size as the mechanism producing the X-rays and radio waves is the same.). So it was reobserved in the radio and found to have grown in the radio too. Thus, an age could be determined since there are 3 observations at different times, allowing an expansion speed to be estimated.
What about the black hole question? Did it make a black hole? What type of supernova was it?
The short answer? We’re not sure and we need further observations to answer these. 
In slightly more detail, the X-ray discovery paper suggests that this is probably a Type 1a supernova, but the paper also makes predictions for what else we should be able to see at other energies if this is the case. So the classification needs to be confirmed.
If this is a type 1a, then its unlikely that a black hole will have been produced as its generally thought that a type 1a progenitor star is an accreting white dwarf star, which, IIRC, when it goes supernova generally results in a neutron star.
My first thought, and as a bad astronomy commenter pointed out…it IS the Firefox logo! The gods are telling us that Firefox is the better browser!
Call me underwhelmed.
It looks more like the eye of Sauron to me
Great. All I can think of now is in how, 5 billion years from now, some distant alien species will be bemoaning the yawn-fest on their version of the internet, when our star blows up.
Except ours really will be a yawn-fest – our Sun is too small to go supernova and will die quietly.
As far as the hype goes, I’m not too sure why all the hype, yes it is interesting, if you’re working on supernova, then its really very exciting and yes it is something that the public can oooh over, but I think the oooh factor may have been more if it hadn’t been for all the hype really building it up.
How much hype was there? This thread is all I saw about it.