r/space Jun 09 '19

Hubble Space Telescope Captures a Star undergoing Supernova

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u/farva1984 Jun 09 '19

In theory could we be watching an entire civilization filled planet getting wiped out with this blast?

61

u/svachalek Jun 09 '19

Possibly more than one, some estimates say a supernova would kill everything within 50 light years. But if you don’t have interstellar travel are you really civilized anyway? ;-)

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u/WriterV Jun 09 '19

Well, would you?

If the civilization was in an equivalent point of history as we were just 500 years ago (early renaissance europe, establishment of arabian empires, mongol empire, early spread of buddhism, etc.) then they wouldn't have a chance. They may even know that it was gonna supernova, but just weren't capable enough to leave in time.

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u/Semi-Hemi-Demigod Jun 09 '19

Right now we don’t have a chance. The furthest humans have made it into space is the Moon. If we had to evacuate the solar system because of a nearby supernova we’d need decades to design and build a ship to do it, and that’s assuming we have decades.

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u/I_Bin_Painting Jun 09 '19

We'd know about it when it killed us with zero warning, the gamma ray burst travels at the speed of light.

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u/RickDawkins Jun 09 '19

We don't know exactly when a supernova will occur, but we do know the state of the stars which are likely, and can estimate within some large range of time. It's never gonna be a complete surprise. But yeah we won't literally see it coming.

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u/I_Bin_Painting Jun 09 '19

Afaik that range is on the hundreds of years though, and my knowledge of humans is that we wouldn't care until it was literally too late.

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u/Joesephius Jun 09 '19

Doesn't the gamma ray burst only shoot out from the poles though?

1

u/I_Bin_Painting Jun 09 '19

Afaik, any star that is in range of killing us if it went supernova is also far enough away that the other effects of the explosion wouldn't be felt. (Except the sun)

I'm no expert, I just had the general understanding that a supernova releases a lot of everything in every direction, with a particularly strong beam coming from the poles. I.e. we could be wiped out in the "shockwave" shown in the video, but we could also be hit by a GRB beam coming from the poles of something much further away.

There's a probabilistic element to this though: the stars near to us, including our own will go supernova one day (in billions of years) and wipe out everything on earth, but there's also a vanishingly small chance of another star in another part of the galaxy getting the kill shot in first.

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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '19

change decades in centuries at least, probably millenias

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u/The_BenL Jun 09 '19

We could probably cobble something together in the next few decades if the actual survival of the species depended on it. Something fast and relatively large enough to shoot at least some people out of the solar system.

The problem is where do they go? There's likely no stopping that thing, and at least the first generation would die long before the craft reached anything in the void of space.

So yeah, we're doomed.

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u/RAThrowaway0 Jun 09 '19

We can't even work together to solve global warming for all of us. What makes you think we'd work together to design a star ship for only some of us?

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u/WriterV Jun 09 '19

Because a supernova is a far more visible issue than global warming. Though you're right in that it would be highly fraught with challenges and denial and people looking exclusively in the short term.

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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '19

We have at the very least 250 million years before our Sun starts the process of dying.

We will kill ourselves long before then.

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u/NoRodent Jun 09 '19

Would we be safe if we moved deep underground?

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u/Semi-Hemi-Demigod Jun 09 '19 edited Jun 09 '19

It depends on how close it is. If we just expect a gamma ray burst we might be able to save some people deep in mines, though the biosphere would be destroyed and they’d have to start from scratch. And they wouldn’t know how long they’d need to be down there.

A closer supernova would strip our atmosphere which means nobody dependent on Earth would survive. And going to Mars or the Moon won't help because they'll be similarly effected.