What happens if sun goes supernova

On the side of Earth that faced the Sun, the explosion would boil away the surface of the Earth at hundreds of meters per second. Scattered light would heat Earth to lethal temperatures. Scientists estimate that the planet would be roughly 15 times hotter than the surface of the Sun currently is.

Far above the boiling point of any known material, and much hotter than any human can withstand obviously. The tiny dwarf planet would also be heated to temps hotter than the surface of the Sun. Care about supporting clean energy adoption?

Find out how much money and planet! By signing up through this link , Futurism. First, if the Sun went supernova scientists would be terribly, terribly confused. It will get smaller and smaller, eventually becoming what we then call a white dwarf.

A white dwarf is the core of a dead star. They are super heavy, weighing almost as much as the sun, while being only the size of the Earth. A teaspoon of white dwarf would weigh somewhere around 6, kilograms — as much as an adult elephant! When the sun is a white dwarf, most of the solar system will still be around.

So will the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt and dwarf planets like Pluto. Eventually it will become very dark. The light from the sun is what keeps our planet warm. Without it, the planets in the solar system will get very cold. Scientists have learned a lot about the universe by studying supernovas. They use the second type of supernova the kind involving white dwarfs like a ruler, to measure distances in space. Stars generate the chemical elements needed to make everything in our universe.

At their cores, stars convert simple elements like hydrogen into heavier elements. These heavier elements, such as carbon and nitrogen, are the elements needed for life. Only massive stars can make heavy elements like gold, silver, and uranium. When explosive supernovas happen, stars distribute both stored-up and newly-created elements throughout space. NASA scientists use a number of different types of telescopes to search for and then study supernovas.

NuSTAR is helping scientists observe supernovas and young nebulas to learn more about what happens leading up to, during, and after these spectacular blasts. What Is a Supernova? The Short Answer:. More about stars! In , we observed a supernova from , light-years away with both light and neutrinos. The neutrinos arrived at three different detectors across the world, spanning about 10 seconds from the earliest to the latest.

The light from the supernova, however, didn't begin arriving until hours later. By the time the first visual signatures arrived, everything on Earth would have already been vaporized for hours. A supernova explosion enriches the surrounding interstellar medium with heavy elements. The outer This explosion also emitted a huge variety of neutrinos, some of which made it all the way to Earth.

Perhaps the scariest part of neutrinos is how there's no good way to shield yourself from them. According to some estimates, not only would all life on an Earth-like planet be destroyed by neutrinos, but any life anywhere in a comparable solar system would meet that same fate, even out at the distance of Pluto, before the first light from the supernova ever arrived.

The only early detection system we'd ever be able to install to know something was coming is a sufficiently sensitive neutrino detector, which could detect the unique, surefire signatures of neutrinos generated from each of carbon, neon, oxygen, and silicon burning. We would know when each of these transitions happened, giving life a few hours to say their final goodbyes during the silicon-burning phase before the supernova occurred. There are many natural neutrino signatures produced by stars and other processes in the Universe.

It's horrifying to think that an event as fascinating and destructive as a supernova, despite all the spectacular effects it produces, would kill anything nearby before a single perceptible signal arrived, but that's absolutely the case with neutrinos. No amount of shielding, even from being on the opposite side of the planet from the supernova, would help at all. Whenever any star goes supernova, neutrinos are the first signal that can be detected from them, but by the time they arrive, it's already too late.

Even with how rarely they interact, they'd sterilize their entire solar system before the light or matter from the blast ever arrived. At the moment of a supernova's ignition, the fate of death is sealed by the stealthiest killer of all: the elusive neutrino.

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