Wow....
Thank you Randall Munroe. You're my hero.
Discuss? :-D
Interesting (and funny) discussion of the intersection between an immeasurably small force and an immeasurably large one:
Lethal dose of Neutrinos?
Rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that.
Here's a question to give you a sense of scale:
Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:
A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth,
-or-
The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?
Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.
I just read that the other day, but the hydrogen bomb was strapped to your chest.
A "Walter" fart is worse...
Comparing the explosion of a star with a megatons bomb. Wauw.
But still, imagine having that bomb, detonating it, and then a few microseconds later(assuming the atombomb takes microseconds) the supernova at almost the same time. Would make a good movie effect.
From my N64 days, i remember turok with that atombomb gun. I still love that effect. Rumbling explosion, the screen goes whiter and whiter and then after, the dimming...
But that comparison included a distance. What would you rather have? A firecracker stuck up your nostril, or a stick of dynamite 500 yards away? Clearly, the dynamite is the better choice. Only in this case, it's the firecracker at your nose, and the dynamite 93 million miles away, and that dynamite is 9 orders of magnitude brighter to you.
excellent point!What is even crazier, is that of all the energy released in the supernova, less than 1% of it is in the form of photons. Or light. The rest, neutrinos.
Expanding on this, during the collapse of the star, it is thought that the density is so high in the collapsing material that the neutrinos can actually impart a significant amount of energy into it. Heating it or even pushing it out, thus possibly even causing the exploding part of the supernova!
What is even crazier, is that of all the energy released in the supernova, less than 1% of it is in the form of photons. Or light. The rest, neutrinos.
Expanding on this, during the collapse of the star, it is thought that the density is so high in the collapsing material that the neutrinos can actually impart a significant amount of energy into it. Heating it or even pushing it out, thus possibly even causing the exploding part of the supernova!
excellent point!
to elaborate on that for those who aren't familiar w/ neutrinos and their properties, know that while they are particles of ordinary matter, their mass is so small that they hardly interact with other forms of ordinary matter. they also have no electrical charge as the name suggests, and travel at a sizable fraction of the speed of light (~0.999c). according to wiki, neutrino flux caused by the sun alone is 65,000,000,000 neutrinos per cm² per second, which means that trillions of neutrinos are passing through our bodies per second as we speak.
there is a neutrino detector grid in the Antarctic, where detectors are spaced evenly along cables and suspended from the surface to over a kilometer down into the densely frozen ice sheet. the location was chosen b/c nowhere else on earth is there such a large area of consistently dense material. if we have a chance at detecting neutrinos, our best bet is in an arctic ice sheet where H2O molecules are densely packed miles deep and miles wide. and yet despite billions of registered detections, most are due to cosmic rays, and only a ridiculously small fraction accounts for actual neutrino detections (on the order of 0.0000000001%).
so we know that arctic ice sheets are some of the densest objects on earth, and despite the existence of a neutrino detector grid that extends both over a large surface area of the ice and also over a kilometer down into it, neutrino detections here on earth are incredibly fleeting. we know the material inside a collapsing star must be incredibly dense simply b/c their remnants (when they leave one behind) are incredibly dense...but if theory is correct, we can also say that the material inside a collapsing star must be incredibly dense if neutrinos are in fact responsible for the explosion part of a supernova. after all, how could neutrinos interact with so much matter if it weren't incredibly dense to begin with?
i like to reference the Crab Nebula (a supernova remnant) in "fun fact" threads like these. in the year 1054, an otherwise ordinary star in our night sky became 4 times as bright as Venus (the brightest object in the night sky after the moon), and was visible in the daytime sky for 23 days straight, before beginning to fade again. big deal, right? well it turns out that the explosion humankind saw in the sky back in 1054 actually occurred 6300 years before that - that's right, the object is 6300 light years away from us. now since the earth-to-sun distance was mentioned in the OP, lets put 6300 light years into perspective. there are 5,865,696,000,000 miles in a light year, so the Crab Nebula is 6300 light years, or 36,953,884,800,000,000 miles, away from us. the sun is on average 93,000,000 miles from earth, which means that the Crab Nebula is approx. 397,353,600 times farther away from us than the Sun. i think the fact that something that far away became the 3rd brightest extrasolar object to ever appear in earth's nighttime (or daytime) sky for 23 days straight is a more humbling comparison than the "supernova at the sun's location vs an H-bomb strapped to your face" scenario...but that's just me...
sorry for bumping but thought i'd add - plus only a tiny part of the energy would have hit the earth (assuming the energy was released in a spherical way?)