VERY INTERESTING: SUPERNOVA

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Facts about supernovae that you may have not known

Somewhere in the cosmos, a star is reaching the end of its life. Maybe it’s a massive star, collapsing under its own gravity. Or maybe it’s a dense cinder of a star, greedily stealing matter from a companion star until it can’t handle its own mass.

Whatever the reason, this star doesn’t fade quietly into the dark fabric of space and time. It goes kicking and screaming, exploding its stellar guts across the universe, leaving us with unparalleled brightness and a tsunami of particles and elements. It becomes a supernova.

1. The oldest recorded supernova dates back almost 2000 years

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers noticed a bright light in the sky. Documenting their observations in the Book of Later Han, these ancient astronomers noted that it sparkled like a star, appeared to be half the size of a bamboo mat and did not travel through the sky like a comet. Over the next eight months this celestial visitor slowly faded from sight. They called it a “guest star.”

Two millennia later, in the 1960s, scientists found hints of this mysterious visitor in the remnants of a supernova approximately 8000 light-years away. The supernova, SN 185, is the oldest known supernova recorded by humankind.

2. Many of the elements we’re made of come from supernovae

Everything from the oxygen you’re breathing to the calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood and the silicon in your computer was brewed up in the heart of a star.

As a supernova explodes, it unleashes a hurricane of nuclear reactions. These nuclear reactions produce many of the building blocks of the world around us. The lion’s share of elements between oxygen and iron comes from core-collapse supernovae, those massive stars that collapse under their own gravity. They share the responsibility of producing the universe’s iron with thermonuclear supernovae, white dwarves that steal mass from their binary companions. Scientists also believe supernovae are a key site for the production of most of the elements heavier than iron.

3. Supernovae are neutrino factories

In a 10-second period, a core-collapse supernova will release a burst of more than 1058 neutrinos, ghostly particles that can travel undisturbed through almost everything in the universe.

Outside of the core of a supernova, it would take a light-year of lead to stop a neutrino. But when a star explodes, the center can become so dense that even neutrinos take a little while to escape. When they do escape, neutrinos carry away 99 percent of the energy of the supernova.

Scientists watch for that burst of neutrinos using an early warning system called SNEWS. SNEWS is a network of neutrino detectors across the world. Each detector is programmed to send a datagram to a central computer whenever it sees a burst of neutrinos. If more than two experiments observe a burst within 10 seconds, the computer issues an automatic alert to the astronomical community to look out for an exploding star.

But you don’t have to be an expert astronomer to receive an alert. Anyone can sign up to be among the first to know that a star’s core has collapsed.

4. Supernovae are powerful particle accelerators

Supernovae are natural space laboratories; they can accelerate particles to at least 1000 times the energy of particles in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful collider on Earth.

The interaction between the blast of a supernova and the surrounding interstellar gas creates a magnetized region, called a shock. As particles move into the shock, they bounce around the magnetic field and get accelerated, much like a basketball being dribbled closer and closer to the ground. When they are released into space, some of these high-energy particles, called cosmic rays, eventually slam into our atmosphere, colliding with atoms and creating showers of secondary particles that rain down on our heads.

5. Supernovae produce radioactivity

In addition to forging elements and neutrinos, the nuclear reactions inside of supernovae also cook up radioactive isotopes. Some of this radioactivity emits light signals, such as gamma rays, that we can see in space.

This radioactivity is part of what makes supernovae so bright. It also provides us with a way to determine if any supernovae have blown up near Earth. If a supernova occurred close enough to our planet, we’d be sprayed with some of these unstable nuclei. So when scientists come across layers of sediment with spikes of radioactive isotopes, they know to investigate whether what they’ve found was spit out by an exploding star.

In 1998, physicists analysed crusts from the bottom of the ocean and found layers with a surge of 60Fe, a rare radioactive isotope of iron that can be created in copious amounts inside supernovae. Using the rate at which 60Fe decays over time, they were able to calculate how long ago it landed on Earth. They determined that it was most likely dumped on our planet by a nearby supernova about 2.8 million years ago.

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking