In which I play Phil Plait, because he's too busy to complain about popular entertainment these days

[mmcirvin]

Spoilers for Sherlock episode 3, "The Great Game":


This episode of Steven Moffat's modern-day Sherlock Holmes series (written by occasional Doctor Who writer and actor Mark Gatiss) carries over one of Arthur Conan Doyle's least plausible details about Holmes, that he's so concerned with keeping irrelevant facts from cluttering his head that he doesn't know the Earth goes around the Sun. Yet he remembers an astronomical detail when it is relevant to a case, which gives Watson an opportunity to say "told you so" but (as the Onion AV Club review pointed out) also raises the question of why he remembered that other fact in the first place.

But that detail didn't quite ring true for me for other reasons.

There's this "lost Vermeer" that Holmes knows has to be a fake, by his usual over-the-top "deductive" methods, but he can't prove it. Moriarty suddenly presents him with a ticking-bomb scenario in which he has to figure out the proof in a matter of seconds. What he realizes is that there's an extra star in the sky: the "Van Buren Supernova", which was only visible in 1858. So the painting couldn't possibly be a Vermeer. (In a previous scene, a hulking assassin has murdered an astronomy professor at a local planetarium, presumably to help cover up the fake.)

The Van Buren Supernova is fictional; in the real world, there was a supernova in the Andromeda Galaxy in 1885, but it only got up to sixth magnitude. Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud was a naked-eye object, but the last really bright one, in our own galaxy, was in 1604. Naked-eye novae do happen every so often. The name "Van Buren" was probably taken from the present-day astronomer Dave van Buren.

But suppose the supernova were real. Would this bit of the story make any sense? I don't think so. The problem is, it's too obvious.

There's a brief shot of the painting, and the supernova looks to be a very bright star, first- or second-magnitude, in the Winter Hexagon, near Orion. Maybe in Monoceros or Gemini, but far enough from the ecliptic that it would be unlikely to be a planet, though I'd have to watch closely again to be sure. Anyway, anyone with a passing acquaintance with the night sky would know that something was off, and if there really had been a supernova like that in 1858, they might well have known that too.

So it surely wouldn't have taken an astronomy professor, or Sherlock Holmes, to realize that the painting was a fake. Lots of art historians would have noticed it. That assassin in the planetarium would have had to bump off a lot of people.

And then there's the question of why someone setting out to fake a Vermeer would bother to paint a recognizable set of constellations in the sky, but also put that honking obvious supernova in there. This may have been inattention on my part, but it wasn't clear to me whether the fake was supposed to have been from 1858, or a modern fake (which would have made it even more baffling).

I was thinking the supernova was maybe intentionally put in there by Moriarty as part of his evil supergenius games, kind of like the way the Riddler's entire purpose in life seems to be to leave clues to get caught by Batman, but other dialogue seems to imply that the scheme was supposed to make sense until Moriarty decided to use it to toy with Holmes.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Sixth magnitude is considered the limit of human-eye visibility, but someone in late 18th-century London would have a hard time spotting the full moon through all of that coal-fog. However, astronomy was in a sufficient state at the that period to notice and remark upon the sudden bright new star in a nearby "island universe."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Though until the 20th century, it was a minority opinion that "spiral nebulae" were external galaxies.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Hmm, evidently "Island Universe," goes back to Immanuel Kant in 1755, but the wikipedia article then uses the phrase in 2 more ways that suggest variously that it was an accepted concept of astronomers as being independent universes, followed by it being an accepted euphamism for a distance conglomeration of stars. Actually that last bit seems to be true, and also 20th Century.

At least Messier predates Holmes, so it's safe to say that "nebulous objects" could be found under the watchful eyes of astronomers.