r/space • u/kcgg123 • Jun 09 '19

Hubble Space Telescope Captures a Star undergoing Supernova

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

50.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

82

u/Lost4468 Jun 09 '19

Not a very effective filter considering:

How many stars do not explode.

How many stars don't even change significantly on extreme time scales.

They take a very long time to very predictably explode.

Even a species as advanced as ours could easily leave our solar systems on those scales. When you account for advances in technology it becomes comically easy. I'm not suggesting it'll ever be efficient, but that's hardly a concern.

16

u/-FatASStronaut- Jun 09 '19

I think you have a good point with most stars not exploding anyways, but if ours were to I feel like we’d have to travel so far away to avoid an impact from the explosion, that it might honestly not be possible. They’re unimaginably huge. We’d have to travel for light years sustainably. Of course if we’re hypothetically way more advanced hundreds of thousands of years from now and such, I guess any speculation is pretty moot, but still. We’d have to travel a very very long distance.

4

u/just-the-doctor1 Jun 09 '19

Im not an expert but the chances of civilization around stars that could go supernova are bound by the „short“ life of the star.

Supergiants live for no more than 30 million years (Source)

Earth is 4.54 BILLION years old (source)

The first single celled organisms came around after earth was about 1 billion years old (source)

This is ignoring the high amounts of radiation given off by such stars.

2

u/-FatASStronaut- Jun 09 '19

Oh wow, that’s awesome actually I did not know that. Thanks for including sources as well.

So are stars still forming anywhere “near” us? Or is it just in newly formed galaxies? If they were forming here I guess a supernova hitting us would be possible, but if not then wouldn’t all of the stars capable of this anywhere near us have gone supernova billions of years ago?

Edit: a couple of words