It's kind of fun to think that at any moment something might pop and our entire solar system would disappear in a blink of an eye.
If the sun went pop, the Earth wouldn't notice for more than eight minutes, and Neptune not for 4 hours.
JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
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Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#32I'm looking at older pics of Cassiopeia A from the Hubble telescope, and it looks substantially different. How much time needs to pass before a supernova is visibly different? My instinct was that something like this would change over thousands of millions of years, but I'm guessing that's wrong
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#33How quickly do the (damaging to nearby solar systems etc) effects of a supernova propagate through space, in relation to the speed of light?
Or, to put it another way, could we detect the damaging effects of a nearby supernova expanding towards us before those effects actually hit us? And if so, by what factor?
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#34> The star collapses in an explosion
Can anyone explain the above phrase?
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#35How quickly do the (damaging to nearby solar systems etc) effects of a supernova propagate through space, in relation to the speed of light? Or, to put it another way, could we detect the damaging effects of a nearby supernova expanding towards us before those effects actually hit us? And if so, by what factor?
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Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#36It's kind of fun to think that at any moment something might pop and our entire solar system would disappear in a blink of an eye.
If the sun went pop, the Earth wouldn't notice for more than eight minutes, and Neptune not for 4 hours.
If the cause of the pop is moving at the speed of light too. But if it wasn't we might get an early warning.
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#37How quickly do the (damaging to nearby solar systems etc) effects of a supernova propagate through space, in relation to the speed of light? Or, to put it another way, could we detect the damaging effects of a nearby supernova expanding towards us before those effects actually hit us? And if so, by what factor?
The radiation propagates at light speed, but the harmless neutrinos reach us a few hours before the potentially dangerous X-rays and gamma rays. A supernova would have to be within roughly 160 light years to be damaging to Earth.
https://news.fnal.gov/2019/03/waiting-for-neutrinos/
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/safe-distance-from...
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#38> The star collapses in an explosion Can anyone explain the above phrase?
This might be helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova#Core_collapse
I'm not an expert, but an analogy here could perhaps be if you drop a cup of water on the floor (assuming it doesn't break) some of that water is going to rebound on itself/the cup, and will splash upwards. That would be gravitational potential energy being converted to kinetic energy, causing material to be ejected.
With stars, there is a TON of gravitational potential energy, and so when it's converted to kinetic energy during a collapse, you "explode" the lighter weight outer layers of the star away from the more dense core. Some of the stars core remains, and can become either a neutron star or a black hole.
Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#39Re: JWST Captures Image of Supernova That 'Absolutely Shattered' a Star
#40Fair to say this happened 11,000 years ago?
Equally fair to say it's happening right now depending on your frame of reference.