IF the SUN explodes ?! - sciencenerds

If the sun exploded, what would happen to life on earth and would we even see it coming?

Let's get technical.

In a galaxy, the size of the Milky Way, one of the billion stars bound by gravity explodes approximately every 50 to 100 years and outshines all other stars in the galaxy that are composed for weeks to months.

These supernovae are among the most energetic events in the entire universe. We have observed some of them over the centuries, but never one in our cosmic backyard. Although our sun will change during its life by expanding into a red giant so much that it evaporates all inner planets and we are consumed by fire, our sun is simply not heavy enough to become a supernova.

To become a supernova, our sun needs 10 to 100 times the mass it now has, but Dr Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist and Zangief impersonator, with whom we previously worked on this show, had an interesting thought experiment that I would like to share with you. What if our relatively small sun was supernova? What would happen to us First, how does a star die? At the end of a massive star's life, the hydrogen and helium it used with two fuel fusions ran out and in its fusion processes, the star began to burn less efficient and heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon and neon.

When elements get heavier in the process, iron eventually begins to build up in the star core. And when this happens, the fate of a star is sealed.

The fusion of iron does not provide any additional energy. When this happens, there is a huge loss of thermal pressure that is fighting gravity that is trying to collapse the star. About a day after the star begins to burn silicon, the core collapses and the outer shells rush inward towards the iron core 23% at the speed of light and then bounce off the core, creating a shock wave that emanates from the core a few hours later Surface of the star breaks out because the star is so big and produces the equivalent of an entire galaxy light worth 30 years. If this were to happen to our sun, we would not literally see it coming. In terms of distance, the Sun is just over eight minutes of light from Earth and the fastest thing that can move, including information, is the speed of light.

Star composition - layered fashion

                   And so all the information about the sun, where it is, what it does, what it looks like is always eight minutes in the past. If the sun exploded and bathed us in light galaxies, we would not know anything about it until basically the sun, when it happened, would look normal in the sky in one moment and then in the next boom! But now we have to get technical. Would our supernova in the sun actually destroy us? And what would be the real mechanism of our lives if it were? There are two sensible ways that a supernova could wipe us out. First of all, do you think that only the photons, the light brighter than entire galaxies, would be enough to fry us? It's slow because this is actually the scale here. Second, you might think that a supernova’s blast, the material of the star that moves outward, and many per cent of the speed of light would be enough to destroy just an entire planet. And in either case, you'd be right, one of these apocalypses would immediately sterilize the sun-facing side of the earth when the material or light arrived, and the other side of the earth would die shortly afterwards. However, none of these apocalypses would make us do it first, no, this galactic grim reaper is completely invisible.

If our person's supernova, which we should be most concerned about, is something that just pervades you harmlessly. While the hydrogen and helium that drive the sun's fusion burn an immense amount of heat, light and neutrinos are created. Neutrinos are a pretty bizarre particle that is electrically neutral, and so little physicists thought for a long time that they had no mass at all. Neutrinos are known to work only through gravity and weak nuclear power, which means that they hardly interact with matter. To put this weak interaction in perspective, the most common number you can find in physics textbooks is that, thanks to the neutrino flow from the sun, on average about 70 trillion neutrinos are running through the surface of your hand right now and you don't feel anything. In fact, neutrinos interact so weakly that something has to be really stupid before a neutrino hits them on average. But how fat are you? That takes some math.

No, I will not apologize for saying it. What do the kids say on Twitter and Tinder? Consider a neutrino, not to scale. When this particle hits something, its effective collision area is a function of its diameter. This area for a neutrino, for the development of which the physicists took a long time, is indescribably small. So you can imagine that it takes a lot of very, very dense material to stop one.

We are talking about a block of metal through which a neutrino could move that is 1000 times wider than our solar system. It's stupidly thick. The fact that matter is fundamentally transparent to neutrinos makes it very difficult to recognize it. A small detector may never pick up a neutrino, although trillions over trillions of neutrinos pass through it every moment. Scientists circumvent this problem by enlarging everything and building absolutely huge machines. For example, this is the largest neutrino detector in the world, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. It is located at the South Pole and uses all of the untouched ice there as a dense material for the interaction of the neutrinos. A lot of ice is also used.

To maximize the probability of detection, this multi-million dollar device places sensors on a cubic kilometre of ice, which is almost a gigaton of ice. Now we keep saying that thanks to the sun, neutrinos go through everything all the time and you might be thinking, if neutrinos interact more with matter and have more energy, we would be in a lot of trouble. Guess what happens during a supernova. It would not be the light or the pressure wave of a supernova that would have caught us, neutrinos would wipe out all life on earth before we even knew it. Remember how a giant star dies, the core collapses, the material falls inside, bounces off the core, creates a shock wave and blows everything apart.

Now, before any of it breaks apart before the star explodes, an incredible number of neutrinos are generated just when the star breaks down. In just 10 seconds after the core of a star collapses, a vortex of 10 octodecillion (10 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 000) neutrinos flows through the star as if it weren't even there. Now it is somehow not intuitive where we think the energy is from an explosion, but these neutrinos actually carry 99% of a supernova potential, how much energy?

100 trillion joules,

(100 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 000 Joules).

I've never said that word before. And like Dr. Ethan Siegel emphasizes that this type of energy is like throwing an anti-matter bomb the size of a Jupiter onto Jupiter.

When the sun explodes in our mental experiment, all these neutrinos will run through space travelling at more or less the speed of light and will reach Earth about eight minutes later. And when they get there, they will not only pass harmlessly, as neutrinos usually do, because three things are now very different. Remember, on average, the amount of neutrinos that pass through the surface of your hand, thanks to the sun and its average impact area. Here is their energy when they are produced from the sun. Now, during a supernova, all these numbers change for the worse. The flow of neutrinos from the sun would increase by 10 billion times, their average impact area would increase by a factor of 10,000 and their energy would increase by 25 times, now these neutrinos have much more energy, are larger, more likely to interact and there are many more and you wouldn't need a cubic kilometre of ice to feel this. The volume of your body is more than enough. To finally answer our question, I came up with a perfectly named equation, if I say it myself, what I do, I present to you the nova equation.

N is our nucleon density for the material we are travelling through, phi here is the flow of neutrinos from the source as a supernova, V is the volume in question as your human volume, sigma, remember that it is our area of ​​impact of Neutrinos and E is the average energy per particle of neutrino. This equation should be able to tell us how much energy per second is deposited in a human volume during a supernova.

It's very, very specific, but what did you expect from me? If the sun exploded, before it really exploded, every human being on Earth would be mercilessly subjected to 50,000 watts of neutrino energy, 50,000 joules per second. This amounts to a lethal dose of radiation for each person in less than 20 seconds. This flow of neutrinos would continue to vaporize everything on the planet and basically, everything on all the planets of the solar system, hours before the sun's supernova light reached any of those planets, and when it got there, it would find an already burned Earth.

This is a silent apocalypse.

So, if the sun exploded in a supernova, it would not be the explosion itself that would erase the solar system, it would be the ghostly neutrino. And what really scares these ghosts is that there is no place to hide from them, no realistic amount of protection will save you. 

You could not even put an entire planet between you and the sun to protect yourself from these particles. Once again, the sun is not going to rise this way, but if it did, it would take us all with it, not with an explosion, but with a weekly moan of interaction because of science. 

I just want to thank Dr Ethan Siegal's article on this topic that I read in his blog "Start with a blow" on Forbes and it was very informative. Much of the information is from the same place, so I suggest you go and follow it. It is fascinating and read all this, it is very good writing.

Also, if the sun became a supernova, we would not like to warn ourselves. There is something called Supernova Early Warning System that we have established throughout the planet, SNEWS and you can monitor different stars and their exits there, luminosity, what they are doing, to give you an early warning type so that it did not come out of nowhere, but even if we detect it early, I mean, there isn't much you can do.

If you found this value-adding to your knowledge, please leave a comment below.

~sciencenerds