How many supernova explode every year?
badastronomy.beehiiv.com369 points by rbanffy a month ago
369 points by rbanffy a month ago
First off, dont look at the outer wilds discussion on here, just play the game. Second - they didnt say how many letters we need to encode all of the observable supernova in a given year! So 100 billion galaxies, 1 per year per galaxy, we have around 1 billion to encode. Sorry two edits this moring, first one was right. due to math without coffee. 1e9/26^6 is about 3, 1e9/26^7 is less than one. So we might see 'SN2050aaaaaah'!
I bought Outer Wilds based on recommendations like yours and I found it kind of boring. The world is mostly empty and the repetitiveness wore me down. I didn't finish it.
It's a great looking game though and the first hour or two I had a blast.
Same here. I found the controls to be frustrating and the game-play loop to be kinda dull. The story on the other hand, is very good. I get that the game-play is meant to illicit certain feelings, but it just didn't do it for me. I did enjoy reading a synopsis of the story on the wiki though.
This is a common complaint, but I think the controls are actually very tight. Usually the issue is that the player is struggling with travelling in a vacuum with a ship that can quickly get up to tens of thousands of km/h and it's very difficult to judge distances in space. I realise you're unlikely to go back if you've read a story synopsis, but for anyone else I would highly suggest locking on to your target and using the two numbers (your current speed relative to the object and the distance from the object) to judge how hot you're coming in.
Question for you and commenter above, do you play games with controls similar to Outer Wilds often? Do you play many games in general? I've seen this comment a few times and I'm curious why this is such a common talking point. I thought the controls were very intuitive, so I'm curious if it's a familiarity issue or something else.
The thing about Outer Wilds for me is that it's a game about exploration, but most attempts at exploration are punished (limited time frame, sands suffocating you, "ghost matter" kills...). They stuck with a "hard scifi" control scheme where you control your character in 6dof with inertia, which makes some things unnecessarily hard and did not (IMO) add anything to the game itself. The things you interact with in the world are also annoying to use, like the machines where you need to slide a ball around by locking it with your sight... Just let me press a button already!
I think there were two separate puzzles where I had identified the correct solution, but the mechanics were so clunky that my attempt failed. Making me waste time exploring elsewhere. Had to consult a guide just to see that I had unknowingly botched the physics. Which is an awful experience for a puzzle game. Especially when the clock is working against you and some of the set pieces require very specific timing to interact with them (where doors are only open for a certain few minutes in a run).
The game is definitely a unique experience, but some of the design elements hamper the experience.
Did you play with a controller by chance? Asking because I prefer first person view games on PC
I did not play with a controller, which made Dark Bramble effectively impossible to finish because the keyboard is all-or-nothing thrust. Had to cheat to get past it. They should have said that using a controller was mandatory, not recommended.
It's not mandatory, there's 1 part in Dark Bramble where you can go a little faster if you use a very small amount of thrust. You can just use the momentum you came in on though, there's still plenty of time
I don't recall having any problems with the controls. As long as I can invert the y axis, I'm a happy camper.
First person games: yes, quite a lot. Flight sims with wonky physics? No, not really at all.
Some of the controls were fine, but I found the ship piloting experience to be barely usable and definitely not enjoyable.
I don't play 3D games; I bought Outer Wilds for the experience, was unable to understand the controls. I tried really hard, but had to quit.
> The story on the other hand, is very good.
There seems to be lots of games that should have been movies or series instead.
This is tragic. It's one of favorite games of all time--heck, one of my favorite media experiences, period. It's worth pushing through until you get hooked.
I rage quit Outer Wilds. So repetitive, I couldn't take it despite the novel premise. The controls suck and I'm an experienced player.
LOL just started replaying OW for the first time in years, and my immediate reaction to seeing this headline was to go to the comments and make an OW reference
That's one of my favourite hints in Outer Wilds. You will see a Supernova. Not with a fancy telescope, it's visible to the naked eye, and if you watch the sky you'll see another soon enough. You can see this right at the start, and unlike the random direction of the probe launch you don't need any game lore to, if you're smart enough, put two and two together.
It's funny, I noticed I happening and thought it was proof of the opposite - that there had to be some artificial cause for the supernovae (including the Sun), because a real supernova takes many years to progress, not 20 minutes.
Even after visiting the Sun Station I didn't believe it and thought it was a narrative red herring....so the ending was a surprise to me. Somehow.
Honestly one of those rare games that makes you feel like a real explorer, not just someone following a path the devs laid out.
Truly one of the most purest of video games in terms of player freedom, I’m still sad that I didn’t think to record my own playthrough as everyone’s path of discovery is more or less unique.
The freeform gameplay and incredible ending makes OW easily my pick for best game of all time, even though it’s also my least replayed favorite game.
I hope that game will be treated like LothR or Shakespeare, it is truly special experience.
[flagged]
I mean, yes it will, but mostly no that's not what the hint is about. Play the game.
HUGE SPOILER ALERT. SERIOUSLY, PLAY OUTER WILDS.
It's a little more than just " the sun will also go supernova". The core conceit of the games story is that you're living in the final moments of dying universe.
The fact that there is a supernova isn't much of a spoiler. It's more like the premise of the game. It's difficult to not discover this within the first 30 minutes.
The joy of "discovering" it for the first time is a precious memory that would have been a great deal less precious if I had known it would happen ahead of time. It's worth not spoiling.
Oh. Whoops. I thought you were saying the other comment was a huge spoiler, not that YOURS was, and I was like "eh, it's not THAT big of a spoiler." Ah, well. With that mystery abolished, time to return to the likes of Mario!
sounds of brain returning to monke
I love how you respond to a huge spoiler comment with another huge spoiler!
At this point I will never play this game, I guess
It isn’t that much of a spoiler. You find all this out in the very first part of the game.
If that’s enough to ruin the game for you, then it’s not much of a game. Even if it is a big spoiler for you it’s not that big of a loss IMHO - there are so many great games and so little time. The time you don’t spend playing OW you can spend playing something else.
Don't worry, I was being tongue-in-cheek. Running a company takes over any time I'd have spent on games.
Aside from a few weeks of Among Us during the pandemic, I think the most recent game I've played was Little Fighters 2 in 2003-2006!
I really feel like this article should also mention the rate of formation of new stars. According to [1] Universe Magazine the James Webb telescope has revealed that more than 3,000 stars are formed every second.
[1] https://universemagazine.com/en/james-webb-comes-closer-to-r...
Based on this about 5.5 million stars are created every 30 minutes and only about 1 start goes supernova in the same period? This seems like it really reinforces the we are still in the early stages of the universe theory if the ratios are that imbalanced.
Still though the imbalance in those events makes me suspicious that we are missing something.
The vast majority of stars don't supernova.
Also, we're at the tail end of star-forming era. about 95% of all the stars that will be formed, have already been formed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-s...
> only about 1 start goes supernova in the same period?
That we can observe with current technology, yes.
Theoretically, around 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.
I don't understand this comment. Like yes, 3000 stars per second, cool fact. But why would that fact make sense in the article? The article was about being surprised by the name "SN 2021 afdx", which has nothing to do with star formation.
In my opinion the article was great and is also complete. More cool astronomy facts belong in some other article or format.
Because the amount of stars that can go supernova is limited by how many stars there are in the first place? A comment about the staggering rate of star formation makes sense to me in relation to an article about the staggering rate of star supernovas..
I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.
Now let us all stop thinking about the incomprehensible and go back to providing value to our shareholders.
It would be a tragic shame for life to inhabit such a vast universe only for faster than light travel to be impossible.
Hmm…
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 environments giving the population-1/2/3 generations of stars…
I would imagine the supernova rate to be higher in the early universe, as we've already passed peak stellar formation rates and the heavier (and shorter lived) stars were more likely to be formed earlier when the average density of the universe was higher.
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.
There is dust between us and most stars in the Milky Way that blocks them from view in visible light. Therefore we can only see a fraction of the supernovae in the Milky Way.
It is substantially easier for us to see supernovae in other galaxies that we're not facing edge-on. And we have a large sample size of such galaxies. That's why our best estimates of supernovae frequency are based on observations of such galaxies, and not on our observations of the Milky Way.
The most stars a person can see with the naked eye? About 8000.
And, less than half that, actually — since we can’t see the other side of the hemisphere
If 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 supernovae). Thanks: yzydserd and zild3d
A star "lasts" about 10 billion years, so you'd expect about 1 in 10 billion stars to 'die' each year, but only a tiny proportion (the very largest) go supernova.
Numbers are huge. Even tiny ratios mean something like 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.
Sounds a lot? Only about 1 star per galaxy goes supernova per century. A lot of galaxies.
Mindblowing.
The lifespan of stars varies a lot by type and size, with largest stars having a very short life-span of maybe a few dozen million of years and small ones up to dozens of billions of years. I'm not sure what the average is.
> A star "lasts" about 10 billion years, so you'd expect about 1 in 10 billion stars to 'die' each year, but only a tiny proportion (the very largest) go supernova.
This analysis really doesn't work. Star lifespan is inversely correlated to size. A star large enough to just barely go supernova is only going to live for ~100M years, and as they get bigger, the lifespans fall rapidly.
(Why? Because gravity is what provides the pressure for fusion to happen, and so more gravity means fusion happens faster. For large stars, the luminosity is something like the mass to the 3.5th power. Also, convection works less well for larger stars, so as stars grow bigger, ever smaller proportion of the star takes any part in the fusion reactions in the core.)
So only 0.12% of all main sequence stars, have the mass that can become the most common type of supernova, and they apparently only last for about 100 million years.
Wouldn’t the creation dates of stars be clustered around certain points in time. So the supernovas should also happen in groups?
what's the rate of Type Ia supernovas? Higher I would guess? (n>=2-aries are common and medium mass main sequence stars are common, though it takes them a while to get to white dwarf)
He mentioned a rough estimate of one per century per galaxy. Estimate for average stars per galaxy is 100 million, which would be 1 in 10 billion stars every year
> 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.
> Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.
Yes. That fact that I'm thinking made me think I was certainly wrong
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.
Binary white dwarf systems can also go supernova, even if the combined mass is not that large as far as stars go.
Isn’t the answer infinity? We don’t know what’s beyond observed part of universe, and there’s infinity number of universes. If our emerged then there’s others.
There is no reason to expect any particular number of universes. We've observed exactly one, this one, which had to exist or else we wouldn't be here to observe that it existed.
Our universe is finite, so although it is unbounded (lacks edges) there aren't an infinite number of anything in it, galaxies, stars, M&Ms, grains of sand, atoms of hydrogen all finite.
Has that really been established? The observable universe is finite, yes, but I wouldn't think that automatically implied that the universe as a whole is.
Simply put we can't know and we can never know if the universe is flat. Now, if the universe has a curvature then we could use that as a baseline for the size of the universe, but as of so far we've not detected one.
> 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, and we don't know if that is the case for our universe. It could be, or it could be finite but unbounded.
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 zero.
Not to forget the recursion. There’s likely universes within our elementary particles or our universe is a particle in parent one.
> 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".
The recursion dimension can not be only having something in this narrow band where we are. There can’t be nothing if you go deeper than subatomic level. Because it has to be made of something in order to support larger recursion.
Please don't present your fantasy as anything to do with actual established science, please.
probability does not work that way
Actually I think it might? If I describe an arbitrary hypothetical object to you is it more likely that it exists or doesn't exist? How does that compare to the case where I present you with a single example of an object and ask you to guess if others that are substantially similar to it exist?
You have so little information that any estimate is effectively arbitrary. Nonetheless I think there's a clear statistical bias between the two choices in both cases.
The SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS): https://snews2.org/
brings together the fantastic [1] Super-Kamiokande, the [2] IceCube, and other global detectors, to provide early warning of Supernovas.
You can subscribe... https://snews2.org//alert-signup/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
This reminds me of a few years ago when I was doing my MSc our group was learning how to work one of the remote telescopes and we were asked to point it at the brightest object found by Gaia that week and it turned out to be a supernova. Very cool for your first observation using a remote telescope! If anyone wants to see it here it is https://ibb.co/Kzqbfq30
And here is the Gaia data http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts/alert/Gaia23bqb/
> [Supernova discovery statistics for 2021] says there were 21,081 supernovae seen in 2021
> When the Vera Rubin survey telescope goes online, it’s expected to see hundreds of thousands of supernovae per year by itself.
Maybe they will have to transition from Base 26 counting to Base 64!
It's in the article. SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa vs SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Apparently astronomers find base26 very straightforward and reasonable!
Also, as a cousin comment alludes to, for there to be one of the above supernovae, there will also be a supernova named SN2067iamsoverystupidoopssorry and a SN2067thisnamingschemawasabadidea
I guess we’re already hitting four letter words, was there a supernova “butt” last year?
That is unfortunate. With only two prime factors, one of which being 13, base 26 is even worse than base 10, and it doesn't even have anatomical coincidence to recommend it. Much better to use base 36 -- we have a ready made character set for it by simply adding the digits to the 26 alphabetic characters. This gives us many more integer prime factors. Not as good as base 60, but better than base 26 and finger numbers.
Why the assumption that base36 would use the western alphabet. If they use Cyrillic, they'd have 33 chars. If they use Japanese, they'd have 46 chars. Using Hindi, they'd have 50 chars.
https://wordfinderx.com/blog/languages-ranked-by-letters-in-...
I have no clue as to the accuracy of this website, but accuracy isn't something we strive for when making ridiculous comments on the interwebs, is it?
Well, the assumption was based on the fact that they chose base 26, and that the "26" came from the use of a 26 character alphabet. The 10 Arabic numerals are then a convenient character set to expand to 36, which is a much nicer number base than 26.
Japanese could be combined with the Hindi character set to yield base 96, which is fairly convenient. Cyrillic would be harder -- perhaps the best options there would be to drop a character to yield base 32, or perhaps 3 characters to yield base 30.
I'd argue that base 60 is probably the optimal number base for nearly any use (with base 16 or 64 as close second and third for working with binary data). Hindi's 50 characters combined with our 10 Arabic numerals could indeed be a great way to get there.
As per the post:
> That’s one hundred billion supernovae per century, or a billion per year, or about 30 per second.
7 characters of base26 gives you 8 billion combinations. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" requires ~1e48 events when going by the actual non base26 scheme. So I wouldn't be worried.
The 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.
It's fun to think that at some point it will be actually vast and completely dark
One of the best infinitive canvas webcomics ever was done on that topic by Drew Weing: https://www.drewweing.com/puppages/13pup.html
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=LcVxE3w-ohGqZAr7
If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
We have a couple trillion years to figure out a way to fix that.
We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
> We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
Spotted the republican
Who, the guy I replied to who expects to be around in a trillion years and wants to live forever? Yeah, peak republican right there.
I guess even a republican can be right?
/dev/random is right sometimes, too.
If you ask someone "What is 2+2?" and they answer 4, you can say they are "right" even if you do not agree with them on other topics or generally dislike them.
If you ask /dev/random "What is 2+2?", that question makes no sense as /dev/random does not listen to you and just spits out random binary output.
Go and disagree with /dev/random.
My point that you successfully explained and intentionally ignored is also: /dev/random ignores all state and evidence, meaning it will continue its predefined behavior even when it's damaging to the environment.
Pretty similar to a republican's mindset: I don't have to fix it, let the next generation deal with the problems that I caused.
Or to acquire the wisdom to accept it. We certainly are far too young to have a perspective to say which course of action is better -- or indeed to define what "better" means.
Does it need fixing?
Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
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 World around it, with a surface area larger than all the planets in those galaxies put together. All of the exploration with none of the boring travel in between interesting places! You can seed it with life from every planet your civilization ever encountered and watch all those ecosystems compete and hybridize as you while away the years. How many years would you have?
While dumping matter into a black hole destroys the matter, it doesn’t destroy the mass. It just confines all of the mass in one place. Powering your Birch World is just a matter of using the Penrose process to extract energy from the black hole for the next few million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years (about 3×10¹⁰⁴ years give or take a few). The stars will only last for about a million trillion years (10²⁰ years plus or minus a bit), so this plan extends your your lifetime by a factor of a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years.
Maximal extension perhaps, but not quite forever. Forever takes a lot more work.
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?
That’s actually [the _last_ question](https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html), not the first.
I liked the DS9 episode where the mutants realized that the universe was collapsing into the Big Crunch, so they demanded “antigravity generators, lots of them!” Their cosmology was wrong, but only because the show had the misfortune to be written in the past. Their enthusiasm was great :)
Technically you can live forever in a universe that is completely empty, it'll just be a lot of cold dark nothing for eternity.
Living forever is such a strange desire, considering that complex life has existed on earth for just a fraction of the time it has existed, and humanity even less than that. I recommend watching the Kurtzgesagt video called All of History in one hour (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo&t=3670s). It displays all of earths history in one hour, and humanity is merely a few seconds of it.
Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, that's 4500000000 years, and in 1300000000 years it will be uninhabitable by humans, and in another 4.5 billion years (roughly 3.2 billion years after becoming uninhabitable) it will be engulfed by the sun.
Assuming humanity manages interstellar space flight you could possibly escape earth and live somewhere else until that also dies, but in case it is not practical or possible, you get to enjoy 3.2 billion years of literally choking and being burned alive on earth.
Assuming you did escape earth (or you're immortal so escaping doesn't matter) In 1000000000000 years the last star will be born, and in 100000000000000 years the last star will die out.
You now have an extremely long time to enjoy suffocating in hard vacuum with your body being boiled by the low pressure, and all in complete darkness until the heat death of the universe occurs in roughly 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years
The Cosmos (both Sagan and Tyson's) shows also display the tiny fraction of life in the history of the universe with their "Cosmic Calendar".
I have to imagine that very few people would make statements like this if we lived in a universe where there was any real danger of it happening. It would be interesting to talk to humans that have lived even a few hundred subjective years, if any existed. That seems to be enough time to lead to very different perspectives on something like immortality. Given the information storage constraints of our minds, I wonder if there is even some age that makes immortality subjectively different than very long life. We don't seem to be capable of remembering even a full decade of experience. By the time you reach a few hundred years of age, would you have any memories at all of your first century? You might not have experienced a single "death" event, but the "you" that was born may have long since died.
>Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
Please read this article first before damning yourself to an unimaginable hell.
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.
So you're saying that eventually Netflix can stop investing in new content?
Astronomers will find out that naming is hard once they need to name 119741st supernova.
I think it will be far before that, once they start hitting supernovae name jackpots like SN2026 cu*t et al.
The whole things seems like such a massive living system that I cannot help guessing that what we think of as universe is just a somewhat large single creature.
This reminds me of this quote from Jill Tarter of SETI, specifically the last sentence:
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)
I think this is not too difficult for humans to comprehend, it just doesn't address the resource appropriation and geographic property claims on this planet. Aside from generational interest, conflict areas tend to have something obviously appealing about them, so there's nothing that a bigger picture nihilism helps with.
Too idealistic view on human nature. We discovered vastly different cultures in the past, no hint of humility (rather exact opposite) or bonding, unless we find a common enemy.
Taken cynically though, is this quote not simply describing the ultimate common enemy?
It's an appealing idea, but surely there'd be insurmountable problems with the distance/time involved for any part to communicate to another part? It'd be like trying to run a computer with a clock that takes millions (billions?) of years to make a single tick. I just don't see that it's at all feasible and that's without even trying to guess as to how different parts can change behaviour depending on its environment (one commonly used requirement of "life").
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 that just because you can’t fathom the scales that makes it impossible. The universe is huge and very very old. It can afford to wait what is a long time to us for something to happen.
I do think you’re likely right in practice though, and that it is too long for the universe to be an organism. But who knows. We already know that mathematically speaking the heat death of the universe looks identical to a very zoomed in big bang, maybe we just need to zoom out a few billion orders of magnitude to see the big picture, where the vast distances and time scales we see appear as little more than micrometers and microseconds apart…
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 vastly different than the minor difference in scales between bacteria and us - we don't have to worry about the speed of light for anything that we currently consider alive.
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.
> The observable universe is a mere 93 billion light-years across
As a non-astronomer, that number still always boggles my mind.
> Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.
Also boggles my mind. Also makes me think of doctor who when the stars start disappearing. I need to rewatch that...
> a clock that takes millions (billions?) of years to make a single tick
Much worse than that, the universe is enormous and it is expanding faster than the maximum possible velocity, as a result such a clock could never complete a single tick.
There's something kinda poetic (and maybe even logical) about the idea that what we perceive as scattered galaxies and physics is actually just the internal processes of something far bigger than we can comprehend.
Poetic, or maybe Lovecraftian. A lot of "cosmic horror" has the trope of vastnesses too big to comprehend, where even trying to think about it (or in some cases merely learning of the possibility) causes you to go mad.
It's like the deeper we peer into reality, the more it starts to look like fiction we were never meant to read.
Well, if physicalism is true then consciousness is a phenomenon of quantum fields, which span the universe. So yes, stretching the definition of creature, this could be interpreted as literally true.
Spoiler alert:
> THIRTY SUPERNOVAE PER SECOND, over the entire observable Universe.
If we have events occuring at some rate in the entire observable universe, and that rate is one a human can easily visualize (e.g. "30"), then the answer to the question "how often do supernovas occur" is probably best summarized as "almost never".
Reminds me of the last lines of the diamond sutra.
> So you should view this fleeting world—
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
Ah, the good old column naming convention from MS Excel. Now there’s an amazing creation that occasionally explodes catastrophically.
Two questions come to mind.
1) When was the last supernova observed in our own galaxy?
2) How close would one have to be to be observed with the naked eye?
1604. One could say we are overdue. I’m not sure about dust or other obstacles blocking it, but based on brightness alone a supernova in our galaxy should be visible with naked eye.
1604? Sort of; SN 1987A was visible to the naked eye at 3rd magnitude. It was in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is almost in our galaxy but not quite. 170k light years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A
Near the top he shows two photos of the Cartwheel galaxy, one from 2014 and one from 2021 with the caption:
> Can you spot Supernova 2021 axdf?
Are you supposed to be able to spot the supernova?
All I've noticed is a couple of small stars that disappear in the latter photo, but this mostly seems to be because it's more blurry.
Use the cross-eye trick to superimpose the two pictures, then it becomes quickly noticeable as it will appear to blink.
Can the thread title be rewritten to be less obnoxious? “How many supernova explode every year?” is fine. This isn’t Reddit. Thread titles should not imply some kind of personality or use cliche meme speak. The all caps is definitely an abomination.
Please read the article along with bikeshedding titles. It's a good one.
The article itself is also written in that kind of quirky meme personality tone. I guess some find it relatable and humorous. Others (like me) find it obnoxious. Matter of taste or perhaps of age bracket. This is the text version of "Youtube voice", which is also evidently successful but not all like it.
Agree. For the record (in case it gets changed), the title at time of writing is “Wait. HOW MANY supernova explode every year?”.
No wonder the Millennium Falcon takes so longer to calculate its jump to hyperspace.
Tens of thousands a year is one an hour!
There are so many supernovae you really could bounce too close to one and that would end your trip real quick
Star Wars takes place entirely within one galaxy, and the number of supernova per galaxy is something like 1 per century, so, nah, Han was just bullshitting to stall for time while his busted-ass computer cobbled together numbers.
Most movies don't even leave our stellar vicinity, because they want to use hyped star/constellation names and these are from the very local set of stars. Not only a naked eye sees only around a few thousands stars, but most of them are basically next door. The mean distance to the star that you can see is <1% of galaxy size. Almost everything you see is in a 10px circle on the 1080p fullscreen galaxy map.
Not only that, it happened a long long time ago. I'm no astronomer; would that be more or less supernovae?
Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.
I suspect you're thinking of a double (floating point). A long long is only a 64 bit integer.
2^64 planck times is 9.9e-25 seconds. Planck times are really tiny.
2^64 nanoseconds is 584 years.
Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length.
The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range.
Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.
Was surprised by the „Und so weiter“ in the text.
And just when we add that variable to our formula we can finally teleport ourselves on to hyperspace.
I couldn't spot the supernova and there's no answer to where it is. :'(
Cross your eyes and lay the two images over each other and it pops out (bottom left of the ring)
Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the universe has exploded
Arguably, our ability to observe in any meaningful sense is still limited to light waves occuring inside a volume not much larger than the earth itself. I mean this in more than just a semantic sense surrounding the verb "observe" -- for all practical purposes everything outside of our solar system is indistinguishable from a preprogrammed light show being projected on a sphere centered on our sun with a diameter of less than a light year. There is a decent chance that will never change. The sheer size of the universe traps us in the ultimate version of Plato's cave.
maybe some Supernova-Names get deleted, like SN2021acab?
I've seen two super nova in my life time. once in 2008 and another in 2012
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Sounds like he was caught beneath landslide, in a champagne supernova… a champagne supernova in the sky
We're dealing with the sum total of everything, if the true nature of things is that there are a finite number of supernovas I'd be surprised. The real shock is how small the number of supernovas is and how young everything seems to be in the known universe (the age of the observed universe is estimated at maybe double digit billion years).
These are tiny numbers given that we're quite possibly dealing with infinity in both time and space. I judge it one of the stronger arguments in favour of the universe being constructed (or, more likely, there is a lot out there we can't see). If god built a universe numbers like 1 supernova a century make some sense for artistic value.
Isn't the observable universe finite? There can't be a infinite number of anything in a space of radius R, even if R is very big.
Anything moving beyond the Cosmological Horizon can no longer be seen.
As I understand it, a frozen image will remain for a time and fade, growing increasingly red shifted.
You can't compare a number of years or events with infinity. Saying it's tiny or huge makes no sense whatsoever.
What amazes me is how young the universe is compared to life. The universe is only about 4 times as old as life on Earth.
The comparison can be made; almost all positive integers can't practically be represented in hindu-arabic because they are too large. If we're dealing with numbers that can be scribed in a few seconds they are small in a meaningful way.
We'd expect that the mathematicians would need to come up with a new notation to represent the age of the universe.
Or to flip that around, life has existed on Earth for about 25% of the lifetime of the universe.
The fact that we are part of that life introduces some nasty sampling biases, but if we find even one more planet that shows a similar ratio, the implications will be that life is ubiquitous.
its 1 supernova per century per galaxy. there are many galaxies: more than 10 stars go supernova every second across the universe. tens of thousands have gone supernova since the article was posted to HN. tiny percentages in a large sample are huge numbers, you might even say 'astronomical'.
There is a really good intuitive analogy hiding here for the scale of the universe:
Our galaxy is to the observable universe as a tenth of a second is to your entire lifetime.
> 1 supernova a century
A century being the amount of time it takes earth, one specific planet to orbit its star 100 times? What about all the other planets and stars?
A century is approximately three billion seconds, the second being variously defined across history as a multiple we find convenient of whatever universal natural constant we can most precisely measure -- most recently 10 billion or so of a specific type of vibration of cesium atoms.
All the other stars and planets would have the same experience, though their local orbital periods might result in different units of expression being more convenient.
Of course, as we leave our galaxy they would also be in significantly different reference frames and perhaps experience the rate differently as a result. We are assuming that, statistically, our relative velocity is not special and they see roughly the same relationship between red shift and distance that we do.