I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.
Or how small we are
How many supernova explode every year?
151–160 of 196 posts
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s wrong with it taking a billion of our years to tick? Just because we, smaller than microscopic beings compared to the size of the larger structures we observe, find it to be a vastly long time, doesn’t mean that it’s a long time for something the size of the observable universe. For a single bacteria cell, our timeframes must seem immense too. I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but it’s a trap to think t…
The problem with zooming out is that the speed of light sets a specific size/time scale so the more zoomed out you get, the more disconnected the big picture is. The observable universe is a mere 93 billion light-years across, so there's a limit on how far it makes sense to talk about zooming out. Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period. The scales involved are vastl…
Not to mention, the signal strength seems too weak and unstructured to be useful as a basis of any higher order machination. A supernova is unlikely to cause much of anything outside of its immediate vicinity. Unlike neural pathways that are highly structured and mostly lossless, radiation disperses out in all directions and weakens with the square of the distance.
Unless there's something big we're missing. Maybe the cores of stars contain the final ingredient required for DNA formation or something.
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and there’s infinity number of universes There is no evidence that there are a infinite number of universes. All we know of is the one we exist in. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are a very large number of non-interacting "worlds" which may or may not be the same as "universes". And if you meant "infinity number of galaxies" then that would require an infinite-size universe, a…
Yes we don’t know if other universes exist. So it’s 50/50 infinity or one. Then if our universe came into existence, then probability is not 50/50, because we know that something exists, therefore something else is more likely to exist, probability towards infinity. If you were observer of emptiness and no universe or anything existing then you would say it’s more likely there will be nothing, so probability towards…
> There’s likely universes within our elementary particles or our universe is a particle in parent one.
This is a very nonstandard use of the word "likely".
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and there’s infinity number of universes There is no evidence that there are a infinite number of universes. All we know of is the one we exist in. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are a very large number of non-interacting "worlds" which may or may not be the same as "universes". And if you meant "infinity number of galaxies" then that would require an infinite-size universe, a…
Yes we don’t know if other universes exist. So it’s 50/50 infinity or one. Then if our universe came into existence, then probability is not 50/50, because we know that something exists, therefore something else is more likely to exist, probability towards infinity. If you were observer of emptiness and no universe or anything existing then you would say it’s more likely there will be nothing, so probability towards…
probability does not work that way
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#155If I got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year. That's scary. But I think I'm getting the math very wrong. edit: I guess my error might be related to confusing a probability factor with the number of incidents in a period. edit: The right answer is probably up to 1 in every 10bn stars go supernovae in the universe each year (or 1 in 10bn die and a fraction are sup…
> If got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier. It also would mean stars, on average, do not get very old. Over 10% of the stars that the ancient Greeks saw in the sky would have to have gone supernova since then.
Not all stars can go supernova. Sol will never go supernova. Only very massive stars can—or stars that become very massive by absorbing other stars.
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#156Hmm… So that's cool, but now I'm thinking: the distant galaxies are redshifted and time-dilated in equal proportion, and also more densly packed because the universe was smaller in the past, so I expect the actual rate of supernovas to be significantly smaller than simply multiplying 1/century/galaxy by 1e11 galaxies. Edit: also I don't know if rate of supernovas changes over history thanks to different steller envir…
It probably isn't wildly lower today, we know of at least five or six big supernovae in the Milky Way in the past millennium. For 200B stars in our galaxy the size normalized rate implied by that would be like one ever 300 years. So if you extrapolated the Milky Way alone in (cosmological) modernity you would get 10/sec not 30/sec.
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#157The universe is vast and full of nothing... Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
It’s full of radiation everywhere, regardless in which direction we look and how highly we resolve it.
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#158Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the universe has exploded
Now many minds per second does it blow?
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure? At some point you have heard every possible joke that can be told in a timeframe of 10 minutes, 1000 times.
It's very unlikely that I am capable of remembering every single joke that can be told in a timeframe of 10 minutes. If you were to take every such joke in a random order and put that on a loop, the experience would likely be one of perpetual novelty, even if you repeated it 1000 times.
How about: every day there is a small but finite probability that you fall into a deep pit, and it may take years before people find you.
Re: How many supernova explode every year?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you really want to do is put out the stars sooner then, and feed all the hydrogen into the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Dump in all the mass in the galaxy and all of its satellites and everything from Andromeda and its satellites too and it will grow. Nudge Andromeda’s central black hole into orbit around ours so that they merge, etc, etc. Grow it big enough and and you can build a Birch…
I would like to hear what you have to say about forever.
I imagine step 1 will be figuring out a way to reverse entropy?