How many supernova explode every year?
badastronomy.beehiiv.com367 points by rbanffy 8 days ago
367 points by rbanffy 8 days ago
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'!
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.
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.
This is a common complaint, but I think the controls are actually very tight. Usually the issue is that the player is struggling with travelling in a vacuum with a ship that can quickly get up to tens of thousands of km/h and it's very difficult to judge distances in space. I realise you're unlikely to go back if you've read a story synopsis, but for anyone else I would highly suggest locking on to your target and using the two numbers (your current speed relative to the object and the distance from the object) to judge how hot you're coming in.
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.
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!
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.
Did you play with a controller by chance? Asking because I prefer first person view games on PC
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.
It's not mandatory, there's 1 part in Dark Bramble where you can go a little faster if you use a very small amount of thrust. You can just use the momentum you came in on though, there's still plenty of time
I don't recall having any problems with the controls. As long as I can invert the y axis, I'm a happy camper.
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.
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.
> The story on the other hand, is very good.
There seems to be lots of games that should have been movies or series instead.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Honestly one of those rare games that makes you feel like a real explorer, not just someone following a path the devs laid out.
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.
I hope that game will be treated like LothR or Shakespeare, it is truly special experience.
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I mean, yes it will, but mostly no that's not what the hint is about. Play the game.
HUGE SPOILER ALERT. SERIOUSLY, PLAY OUTER WILDS.
It's a little more than just " the sun will also go supernova". The core conceit of the games story is that you're living in the final moments of dying universe.
The fact that there is a supernova isn't much of a spoiler. It's more like the premise of the game. It's difficult to not discover this within the first 30 minutes.
The joy of "discovering" it for the first time is a precious memory that would have been a great deal less precious if I had known it would happen ahead of time. It's worth not spoiling.
Oh. Whoops. I thought you were saying the other comment was a huge spoiler, not that YOURS was, and I was like "eh, it's not THAT big of a spoiler." Ah, well. With that mystery abolished, time to return to the likes of Mario!
sounds of brain returning to monke
I love how you respond to a huge spoiler comment with another huge spoiler!
At this point I will never play this game, I guess
It isn’t that much of a spoiler. You find all this out in the very first part of the game.
If that’s enough to ruin the game for you, then it’s not much of a game. Even if it is a big spoiler for you it’s not that big of a loss IMHO - there are so many great games and so little time. The time you don’t spend playing OW you can spend playing something else.
Don't worry, I was being tongue-in-cheek. Running a company takes over any time I'd have spent on games.
Aside from a few weeks of Among Us during the pandemic, I think the most recent game I've played was Little Fighters 2 in 2003-2006!
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...
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.
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...
> only about 1 start goes supernova in the same period?
That we can observe with current technology, yes.
Theoretically, around 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.
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.
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..
I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.
Now let us all stop thinking about the incomprehensible and go back to providing value to our shareholders.
It would be a tragic shame for life to inhabit such a vast universe only for faster than light travel to be impossible.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
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
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
Wouldn’t the creation dates of stars be clustered around certain points in time. So the supernovas should also happen in groups?
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)
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
> 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.
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.
Binary white dwarf systems can also go supernova, even if the combined mass is not that large as far as stars go.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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".
probability does not work that way
Actually I think it might? If I describe an arbitrary hypothetical object to you is it more likely that it exists or doesn't exist? How does that compare to the case where I present you with a single example of an object and ask you to guess if others that are substantially similar to it exist?
You have so little information that any estimate is effectively arbitrary. Nonetheless I think there's a clear statistical bias between the two choices in both cases.
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
> [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.
Maybe they will have to transition from Base 26 counting to Base 64!
It's in the article. SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa vs SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Apparently astronomers find base26 very straightforward and reasonable!
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
I guess we’re already hitting four letter words, was there a supernova “butt” last year?
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.
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?
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.
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.
The universe is vast and full of nothing...
Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
It’s full of radiation everywhere, regardless in which direction we look and how highly we resolve it.
It's fun to think that at some point it will be actually vast and completely dark
One of the best infinitive canvas webcomics ever was done on that topic by Drew Weing: https://www.drewweing.com/puppages/13pup.html
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...
We have a couple trillion years to figure out a way to fix that.
We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
> We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
Spotted the republican
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.
I guess even a republican can be right?
/dev/random is right sometimes, too.
If you ask someone "What is 2+2?" and they answer 4, you can say they are "right" even if you do not agree with them on other topics or generally dislike them.
If you ask /dev/random "What is 2+2?", that question makes no sense as /dev/random does not listen to you and just spits out random binary output.
Go and disagree with /dev/random.
My point that you successfully explained and intentionally ignored is also: /dev/random ignores all state and evidence, meaning it will continue its predefined behavior even when it's damaging to the environment.
Pretty similar to a republican's mindset: I don't have to fix it, let the next generation deal with the problems that I caused.