[HN Gopher] How many supernova explode every year?
___________________________________________________________________
How many supernova explode every year?
Author : rbanffy
Score : 348 points
Date : 2025-04-12 06:48 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (badastronomy.beehiiv.com)
| darthrupert wrote:
| 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.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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").
| tialaramex wrote:
| > 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.
| dkersten wrote:
| 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...
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| 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.
| mrep wrote:
| > 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...
| daxfohl wrote:
| 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.
| Cyphase wrote:
| 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)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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.
| jajko wrote:
| 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| Taken cynically though, is this quote not simply describing
| the ultimate common enemy?
| SwtCyber wrote:
| 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.
| jxf wrote:
| 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.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| Some might call that God. Or at least some form of Pantheism
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| 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.
| drbig wrote:
| The universe is vast and full of nothing...
|
| Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
| subscribed wrote:
| It's fun to think that at some point it will be actually vast
| and completely dark
| jvm___ wrote:
| 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...
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| Really incredible video, thanks a quadrillion
| rbanffy wrote:
| We have a couple trillion years to figure out a way to fix
| that.
| frainfreeze wrote:
| Does it need fixing?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
| db48x wrote:
| 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 3x10104 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.
| mietek wrote:
| I would like to hear what you have to say about forever.
| lazide wrote:
| I imagine step 1 will be figuring out a way to reverse
| entropy?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Something about there being light, IIRC.
| db48x wrote:
| That's actually [the _last_ question](https://users.ece.c
| mu.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 :)
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| man, I couldn't think of anything worse - except maybe
| dynamic types
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| 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 10000000000000000
| 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
| 000000000000000000000000000000000 years
| the_af wrote:
| 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".
| amelius wrote:
| Are you sure? At some point you have heard every possible
| joke that can be told in a timeframe of 10 minutes, 1000
| times.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Since I'd like to live forever, then yes.
|
| Please read this article first before damning yourself to
| an unimaginable hell.
|
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-
| number.html
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| We don't need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You'll be
| long dead anyway.
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| > We don't need to fix that, do we? Just let it be.
| You'll be long dead anyway.
|
| Spotted the republican
| selectnull wrote:
| I guess even a republican can be right?
| h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote:
| /dev/random is right sometimes, too.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| huxley wrote:
| One of the best infinitive canvas webcomics ever was done on
| that topic by Drew Weing:
| https://www.drewweing.com/puppages/13pup.html
| layer8 wrote:
| It's full of radiation everywhere, regardless in which
| direction we look and how highly we resolve it.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| eurekin wrote:
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon
| foxglacier wrote:
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| mrep wrote:
| > 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?
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| yzydserd wrote:
| 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'.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| jampekka wrote:
| I couldn't spot the supernova and there's no answer to where it
| is. :'(
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's in NGX 1566
| pansa2 wrote:
| Bottom-left corner
| dwighttk wrote:
| Cross your eyes and lay the two images over each other and it
| pops out (bottom left of the ring)
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Honestly one of those rare games that makes you feel like a
| real explorer, not just someone following a path the devs laid
| out.
| danso wrote:
| 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.
| me_me_me wrote:
| I hope that game will be treated like LothR or Shakespeare, it
| is truly special experience.
| marklar423 wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| 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.
| fooker wrote:
| Please read the article along with bikeshedding titles. It's a
| good one.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| 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.
| deadbabe wrote:
| No. The title sounds like low effort clickbait trash.
| 9rx wrote:
| Clickbait is appealing. This sounds like the opposite.
| Timwi wrote:
| Agree. For the record (in case it gets changed), the title at
| time of writing is "Wait. HOW MANY supernova explode every
| year?".
| herendin2 wrote:
| 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
| Someone wrote:
| > 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.
| herendin2 wrote:
| > 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
| crag-jene wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| Binary white dwarf systems can also go supernova, even if
| the combined mass is not that large as far as stars go.
| zild3d wrote:
| 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
| yzydserd wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| icehawk wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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)
| icehawk wrote:
| 1/2 as common. https://astrobites.org/2022/04/16/template-
| post-9/#:~:text=T...
| jibe wrote:
| Wouldn't the creation dates of stars be clustered around
| certain points in time. So the supernovas should also happen
| in groups?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > 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.)
| dostick wrote:
| 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.
| tialaramex wrote:
| 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.
| atq2119 wrote:
| 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.
| pixl97 wrote:
| 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.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > 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.
| dostick wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 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".
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| probability does not work that way
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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
| SwtCyber wrote:
| Absolutely mind-blowing how much our ability to observe the
| universe has exploded
| a3w wrote:
| exploded, he-he.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Now many minds per second does it blow?
| thih9 wrote:
| > [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.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Maybe they will have to transition from Base 26 counting to
| Base 64!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| It's in the article.
| SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa vs
| SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Apparently
| astronomers find base26 very straightforward and reasonable!
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| 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
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess we're already hitting four letter words, was
| there a supernova "butt" last year?
| moron4hire wrote:
| No, but there was an "AHOY" https://www.wis-
| tns.org/object/2024ahoy
| bronson wrote:
| No, but this is close: https://www.wis-
| tns.org/object/2024ass
| Voultapher wrote:
| 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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?
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| selectnull wrote:
| Astronomers will find out that naming is hard once they need to
| name 119741st supernova.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| I think it will be far before that, once they start hitting
| supernovae name jackpots like SN2026 cu*t et al.
| selectnull wrote:
| I know :) This one was just the first to came to mind.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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
| ninkendo wrote:
| 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.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Not only that, it happened a long long time ago. I'm no
| astronomer; would that be more or less supernovae?
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| 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.
| henryway wrote:
| Sounds like he was caught beneath landslide, in a champagne
| supernova... a champagne supernova in the sky
| croes wrote:
| Was surprised by the ,,Und so weiter" in the text.
| weard_beard wrote:
| Das ist mir Wurst
| nashashmi wrote:
| And just when we add that variable to our formula we can finally
| teleport ourselves on to hyperspace.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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...
| wolfram74 wrote:
| 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.
| ls612 wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.
| rookderby wrote:
| 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'!
| danso wrote:
| 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
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| packetlost wrote:
| 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.
| shhsshs wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't recall having any problems with the controls. As
| long as I can invert the y axis, I'm a happy camper.
| ykonstant wrote:
| 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.
| frabert wrote:
| 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!
| spookie wrote:
| Did you play with a controller by chance? Asking because
| I prefer first person view games on PC
| frabert wrote:
| Yes, the game told me it was the preferred way and I
| followed the advice
| spookie wrote:
| fair enough!
| Trixter wrote:
| 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.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| packetlost wrote:
| 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.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > The story on the other hand, is very good.
|
| There seems to be lots of games that should have been
| movies or series instead.
| astroalex wrote:
| 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.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Spoiler alert:
|
| > THIRTY SUPERNOVAE PER SECOND, over the entire observable
| Universe.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| 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".
| belter wrote:
| 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
| croisillon wrote:
| maybe some Supernova-Names get deleted, like SN2021acab?
| didgetmaster wrote:
| 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?
| ardel95 wrote:
| 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.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| 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
| jxf wrote:
| I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how
| staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Or how small we are
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| It would be a tragic shame for life to inhabit such a vast
| universe only for faster than light travel to be impossible.
| coryfklein wrote:
| 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.
| piaste wrote:
| Use the cross-eye trick to superimpose the two pictures, then
| it becomes quickly noticeable as it will appear to blink.
| pansa2 wrote:
| Bottom-left corner
| kakuri wrote:
| 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...
| Taek wrote:
| 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.
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| 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..
| citizenpaul wrote:
| 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.
| BobAliceInATree wrote:
| 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...
| jl6 wrote:
| Ah, the good old column naming convention from MS Excel. Now
| _there's_ an amazing creation that occasionally explodes
| catastrophically.
| state_less wrote:
| 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.
| rwky wrote:
| 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/
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