Supernova so powerful it makes nighttime daylight

[Jim_MDP]

Here is one speculation image

[qimg]http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/06/02/13/294B099A00000578-3107379-image-a-80_1433246421266.jpg[/qimg]

https://www.google.com/search?q=ima...7AkIMg&biw=1504&bih=703#imgrc=4JD_5rjavSUbiM:

That is pretty cool.

Looks like Russia's RosCosmos put together a vid (in '15 ?) with various possibilities, including having Andromeda close enough to stretch across maybe half the sky.

Unfortunately, I don't read Russian.
If the calculations are there in the vid, for how close each example would have to be (various Nebulae etc) it wasn't obvious. And I'm too lazy to run the numbers.

But it looked cool.

(But what's with the Daily Fail's stupid headline... "What XYZ would look like if we were closer to space." )

 

[abaddon]

Brightest I've seen is the space station in South Africa

Was bright than this ....station on left ...moon on right
[qimg]https://lintvwtnh.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/12744021_2591227375147_7814082149340047254_n.jpg[/qimg]

at least double the brightness of Venus .....it was an unusual situation as we were very near full dark but the station was still lit by the setting sun ....and damn does it motor along.

If it's full day light ....you've got seconds to live.

Looks like Venus to me, but however, NGCHunter captures ISS so often it is becoming mundane.

 

[macdoc]

It does look like Venus at ot's brightest but moving across the sky faster than an aircraft.
I tracked it in the binocs and could just detect the square shape.

not this clear ...crazy brighter cuz of the angle ....

 

[Undesired Walrus]

What happened to those satellites that were designed to reflect the sun's light onto earth so you could create continuous daylight?

 

[jaydeehess]

What happened to those satellites that were designed to reflect the sun's light onto earth so you could create continuous daylight?

PopSci, 1969 or early 70s? Coming up right after widespread use of flying cars.

Besides those there is also the orbiting ring of huge solar arrays which then send back power to Earth via very high power masers ( bit of a no fly zone), which have the added influence of cooling the equatorial zone slightly to combat global warming and lessen hurricanes.

 

[MRC_Hans]

Without the "death" part? Doubt it.
Astronomical phenomenon are fascinating and beautiful to observe and study... but we really, really don't want any of them in our immediate neighborhood.

I always thought it would be cool if we were in one of the galaxy's globular clusters (we have about 60 of them) so the Milky Way would rise and completely fill the sky. Make amateur astronomy interestingly different too.

But I don't know how illuminated that would make a night sky.
It would be bright, but not daylight bright.

Mmm, the Sun is quite dangerous to be near, yet we survive. How close would a supernova have to be to have the approximate magnitude of the sun? Which is the nearest supernova candidate?

Ah, found it myself: Spica. Link: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/b...the-closest-supernova-candidate/#.WLS9Mzs1-70

ETA: Do read the whole article. Very interesting.


Hans

 

[ceptimus]

That ws my first thought too. My vison of such a thing would be that It would be a confusing time for those on the dark side of the Earth (wrt the SN) as it's light reached us. People on the side facing the SN would die relatively quickly, telecommunications and electrical power systems would fry. People on the other side of the Earth would perhaps get sketchy reports of a calamity and note the loss of communications. The catatrophe would unwind as the Earth revolved, eventually sterilizing the surface of the planet.
If one could get sufficiently underground or otherwise sheilded you could live through it, but what you would emerge to would be an all but dead planet. Perhaps deep sea vent colonies would survive.

Depends on where the star is in the sky. For example if Polaris went supernova (I know it won't) then no one in the southern hemisphere would be able to see it or be directly hit by its gamma rays.

 

[Myriad]

Mmm, the Sun is quite dangerous to be near, yet we survive.

I think the difference is that supernovae are a lot hotter, which means more high-energy rays compared to the visible frequencies. So if it looks as bright as the sun, it's exposing you to a lot more hard radiation than sunlight does.

However, there's another factor to consider. Eyes are really good at adjusting to vastly different light levels, so we're usually unaware of how much light levels actually vary between different conditions. (Photographers had to know this quantitatively, before automatic cameras with high-sensitivity CCDs.) Ambient outdoor light a thousandth as bright as full sunlight would still appear as bright as day, or nearly so. (That would be about 100 lux, comparable to average indoor light). Ten lux would still be 100 times brighter than full moon light; it would look dim but reading etc. would be no problem. A supernova providing that much light at nighttime would be very impressive and as far as I could tell, wouldn't do any significant damage.

 

[Timothy]

Could any natural phenomena create conditions that make the night look like day (without death)?

Your watch stopping for 12 hours?

 

[macdoc]

So far only Kepler has a observed supernova flash ...and then only two of them ....

I'll leave to someone else to calculate how close we would have to be for the very fast flash to light the atmosphere enough to mask the stars momentarily....this is something that would be very transient..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLlILnQjGfc

Published on Mar 21, 2016
The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout” -- is illustrated in this cartoon animation. The animation begins with a view of a red supergiant star that is 500 times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our sun. When the star’s internal furnace can no longer sustain nuclear fusion its core to collapses under gravity. A shockwave from the implosion rushes upward through the star’s layers. The shockwave initially breaks through the star’s visible surface as a series of finger-like plasma jets. Only 20 minute later the full fury of the shockwave reaches the surface and the doomed star blasts apart as a supernova explosion. This animation is based on photometric observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. By closely monitoring the star KSN 2011d, located 1.2 billion light-years away, Kepler caught the onset of the early flash and subsequent explosion.
Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/Kepl...

you can see how steep that brightness curve is ... reading the scale the spike would be 10 minutes long from start to peak to fade ....certainly long enough to be perceived.

What else came with the visible spectrum tho ????

So if this is true

Astronomers have glimpsed the most powerful supernova ever seen, a star in a galaxy billions of light-years away that exploded with such force it briefly shone nearly 600 billion times brighter than our Sun

Our sun is 8 light minutes away.

How close would this one have to be to equal the sun's output on earth ....600 billion times further away ....anyone got a handy dandy calculator.?

 

[ceptimus]

Our sun is 8 light minutes away.

How close would this one have to be to equal the sun's output on earth ....600 billion times further away ....anyone got a handy dandy calculator.?

It's the inverse square law so the formula is (correcting for a more accurate distance to the sun, in light-minutes)

8.32 light minutes x sqrt(600 billion)

About twelve-and-a-quarter light years

 

[ceptimus]

Betelgeuse is 640 light years away and could go supernova any time now*. Despite not being amongst the very closest of stars, it's the ninth brightest star in the sky and would be the brightest if the human eye could see all wavelengths of radiation.

Should put on a good show when it pops.

It's Orion's right shoulder (our left) if you want to look. In a dark sky it looks distinctly red to the naked eye. It's evolving so fast that it probably swapped from being a blue giant to a red one when humans were already around - that probably caused some interesting discussions amongst our ancestors.

* We're using astronomical measures of distance and time of course, so 'any time now' means probably in the next quarter of million years. It's likely that it will last another 200,000 years or so before going supernova, but no one knows for sure

 

[macdoc]

Thanks I think you've answered the OP question and mine. I wonder what sort CME the wave front would present to earth and satellites in that 20 minutes of night into day ....
Back to the stone age as far as tech resources remaining on half the planet ?

 

[Belz...]

Hey. See this article:

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=70143

If a similar supernova went off close to the earth, what would the sky look like at nighttime and how long would it last? Would appreciate a lot of detail so I can visualise it.

Thanks.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

By close, I hope you mean a couple hundred light years. Say, Betelgeuse. We're talking about full moon light for a month or two.

 

[macdoc]

Why would it be a month or two when that measurement of an actual event shows 20 minutes for the bright duration ???

 

[MRC_Hans]

I think the difference is that supernovae are a lot hotter, which means more high-energy rays compared to the visible frequencies. So if it looks as bright as the sun, it's exposing you to a lot more hard radiation than sunlight does.

However, there's another factor to consider. Eyes are really good at adjusting to vastly different light levels, so we're usually unaware of how much light levels actually vary between different conditions. (Photographers had to know this quantitatively, before automatic cameras with high-sensitivity CCDs.) Ambient outdoor light a thousandth as bright as full sunlight would still appear as bright as day, or nearly so. (That would be about 100 lux, comparable to average indoor light). Ten lux would still be 100 times brighter than full moon light; it would look dim but reading etc. would be no problem. A supernova providing that much light at nighttime would be very impressive and as far as I could tell, wouldn't do any significant damage.

Yes. "Appear as light as day" does not equal "as powerful as the Sun". I am looking out on a heavily overcast winter sky (I lie, it was yesterday, still, you get my point), and the light intensity is WAY below that of a bright summer's day, but had it happened last night, I would still say "it was as bright as day".

ETA: You are right about the energy spectrum, but the question is how much would be filtered out by the atmosphere. Most of the hard radiation from the Sun does not reach the surface of the Earth.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

And actually, quoting from the article linked in the OP:

Witnessed from Earth on April 30–May 1, 1006, the massive stellar explosion was—and still is—the brightest supernova in recorded history. Its light blanketed Earth for months, and may have been strong enough to read by. Today we call it SN 1006, but at the time nobody knew quite what to make of it.

Benedictine monks in Switzerland wrote of a star “glittering in aspect and dazzling the eyes, causing alarm.” Their brothers in Italy were less effusive, reporting simply that “a brilliant star gleamed forth.”

So, it "may have" been strong enough to read by. Which only needs to mean somewhat brighter than the full moon.

Hans