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Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now
- mmastrac 2y ago[flagged]
- LeroyRaz 2y agoSupernovas and novas are different. The article mentions how the explosion will not be a supernova but a nova.
- 4ad 2y agoIt's not a supernova, it's a nova. But I agree with you, stars work by nuclear fusion (thermonuclear fusion), so claiming that this event is "thermonuclear" is beyond stupid. The star is already thermonuclear.
- omgJustTest 2y ago"Thermonuclear", even in the colloquial sense, underwhelms the magnitude of this event by... a lot lol. We measure nuclear detonations in 1-10 MT. A nova is more like 10^18-10^30 MT.
- PeterCorless 2y agoI was looking at a solar filament the other day. You know. Just a few hundred thousand kilometers long blast of superheated hydrogen plasma. The fact that this was just normal day-to-day operation of a G2 V star, and it would have consumed the entire planet of Earth, just is incomprehensible to most folks. And that is Sol just happily percolating away. It isn't even the actions of a nova, never mind a supernova.
- PeterCorless 2y agoI am on astronomy TikToks a lot these days. The amount of people who think the sun is a ball of lava is depressing. I am grateful of the steady, consistent education of physicists and astronomers who patiently explain the difference day-in, and day-out. ("No, it's far hotter than that...")
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoThat you're "on astronomy TikToks a lot these days" is depressing.
- PeterCorless 2y agoI play them in the background while working. It's actually rather nice. Professor Nixy caught a flare that almost went X-class the other day.
- shrimp_emoji 2y agoOh. Well, then you have me beat. When boredom increases and task difficulty decreases, my go-to work background is Twitch streams, which are perfect for background-filler purposes but make me want to kill myself. Astronomy TikToks are better.
- ziddoap 2y agoI think it's a very good thing that science educators can reach millions and millions of people they couldn't before. Probably one of the few unequivocally good uses for social media / video sharing platforms. Which part are you finding depressing?
- 4ad 2y agoA recent astronomy video that really depressed me was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG8SwAFQFuU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG8SwAFQFuU.
- yowzadave 2y ago> The star is already thermonuclear Well, since the star is currently a white dwarf, maybe it's not? Fusion doesn't occur on white dwarf stars.
- dwaltrip 2y agoHeh, a lot of snark to end up being wrong yourself. White dwarfs are stellar remnants. They are not performing fusion in their cores like active stars.
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- pixel_tracing 2y agoHow can you predict a supernova will occur in months when these processes take thousands of years?
- 4ad 2y agoIt's a nova, not a supernova. Some novae, including this one, are recurrent.
- francisofascii 2y agoShould be easy to predict since it actually already happened thousands of years ago. :)
- sml156 2y agoThe second paragraph states it happens ~80 years the last time it appeared was in 1946
- tejtm 2y agoThere are different types of nova. This type happens when one of a close binary pair is a is a compact stellar remnant, it already spent its fuel and is a *dense* inert planet sized mass of neutrons. The other star in the binary pair is "not dead yet" but getting there. Late stage stars swell up as the core loses its grip on the outer layers. In this case the binary pair is close enough that the outer shell the red giant is loosing can be captured by the white dwarf. It is snowing star dust! This material landing on the white dwarf is the ordinary (light-ish) matter found in the outer layers of stars. The ball of neutrons that the star-snow is falling on, does not care. When the star-snow lands it settles into a (nigh) perfect sphere. So no mountains, moguls nor mole hills on neutron stars everything will be perfectly smooth. This keeps up until the star-snow is coating the entire planet sized ball of neutrons to a depth of maybe six feet at which point the pressure of its own weight causes it to spontaneously undergo fusion. Rapid fusion of the top layer of mass over an entire planet sized ball does goes brrrr. And again, the ball of neutrons does not care that its entire surface just became an atomic explosion. This process gets used because we can calculate allot of things. We can bound about how big the ball of neutrons could be, smaller it would not form and bigger it would be a black hole. We can bound how much matter could pile up before it has to go boom. We can calculate what an atomic explosion with X amount of matter should look like. So these explosions become sign posts, first because we can see them in other galaxies and the compare what is seen/measured with predictions which gives things like how far away it would have to be to seem X bright, or what must be in the way for this part of the spectrum to be wonky. This particular one is predictable because it is close enough we can have a pretty good estimate to how fast the star-snow is accumulating, and how deep it can get before it pops off, again. Disclamer: no formal ed in this stuff.
- JoeDaDude 2y agoI'm surprised online gambling sites haven't started a poo; for people to pick the actual date of the blast.
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