by rookderby
2 subcomments
- 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'!
by tialaramex
4 subcomments
- 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.
- 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...
- I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.
- 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…
- 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
- 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/
- 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
by herendin2
5 subcomments
- 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
- > [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.
- The universe is vast and full of nothing...
Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
by selectnull
1 subcomments
- Astronomers will find out that naming is hard once they need to name 119741st supernova.
by darthrupert
4 subcomments
- 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.
- Spoiler alert:
> THIRTY SUPERNOVAE PER SECOND, over the entire observable Universe.
by state_less
0 subcomment
- 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.
by didgetmaster
1 subcomments
- 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?
by coryfklein
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by lifeisstillgood
1 subcomments
- 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
- 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. :'(
- Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the universe has exploded
by croisillon
0 subcomment
- 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
- [flagged]
- 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.
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