Too bad supernovae are always so far away

On 16/01/2016 08:55, Paul Schlyter wrote:
On Thu, 14 Jan 2016 19:14:53 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc
wrote:
On Thursday, January 14, 2016 at 6:02:28 PM UTC-7, Sam Wormley
wrote:
Lucky supernovae are far away.

Yes, but it is unlucky that one far enough away to be safe, but
close enough to
be easily observable, took place just before the invention of the
telescope.

If the Crab Nebula event were to have happened just long enough ago
to be seen today, it would be very useful to astrophysics.

Otoh we would then have to wait some 1000 years before we could see the
Crab nebula as we see it today.

We can also deduce that Messier thought M1 could be confused with a
comet which implies it was perhaps more compact and a little brighter
when he first looked at it.

There are a lot more stars within a shell at radius R as R increases so
it should not come as a great surprise that supernovae tend to be a long
way from home. We don't want one too close to us either. Also in the
plane of our own galaxy dust extinction will potentially dim one that
does go off at least in the visual spectrum.

IK Pegasi is a candidate to go pop some day as a Type Ia standard candle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IK_Pegasi

There are probably a host of other dim white dwarf binary stars that
haven't attracted much attention despite cataclysmic variable studies
and won't until they suddenly become Type Ia supernovae.

And the ultra massive star eta Carina is also on a relatively short fuse
astronomically speaking. Stellar lifetime goes inversely with mass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On Mon, 18 Jan 2016 08:07:35 +0000, Martin Brown
wrote:
And the ultra massive star eta Carina

Eta Carinae :-)

Unlike the rigid rules which govern the connection between astronomy and timekeeping, the magnificent supernova event provides a more flexible discussion from a speculative and more adventurous viewpoint.

As this thread has descended into the usual intellectual cistern by people who have lost their imaginative faculties and who attach unreasonable novelties to these great events, there is a new approach which doesn't cast the supernova event as the demise of a star but rather a transition to the birth of a solar system - E Plurisbus Unum.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astro...7a-0730201524/

The antecedent rings remain so this nonsense of vaporizing other solar systems away from the parent supernova star can be dispensed with quickly even though the dominant empiricist outlook likes nothing better to attach cataclysmic effects to these events as is their custom.

There is something really appealing about looking at our own central star as supplying the material that makes up the physical properties of the planets surrounding it including the physical properties of our bodies. The geometry of the rings of SN1987A represent a clue to this great transition which occurs when a star unfolds to produce a solar system, perhaps not all supernova stars but some.

I was working on the geometry of stellar evolution using two external rings and a smaller intersecting ring in 1990 and 4 years before the rings were visibly observed.