This Star Explosion Will Be Seen In The Sky 2022!

Stars are always up there when we look at the sky in the night. However, even though they look permanent, stars do not live forever. But what happens when they die? Stars explode, creating a spectacular event that is awe-inspiring! Imagine a star as big as the sun exploding! This phenomenon is called a supernova. However, as grand as they are, they do not occur frequently. But then, how powerful are supernovas, and what types of supernova are they? And more importantly, can the Earth be destroyed by a supernova one day? Join us as we explore the fascinating star explosions that light up the sky!
There is nova, and there is supernova. A nova is the temporary flaring up of a dwarf star in a binary system. In the nova scenario, the dwarf star collects matter from its companion star. The excess mass causes the dwarf star to flare up suddenly, every now and then, to many times its average brightness. Then it fades over months to its original luster before the next flare-up.
A supernova, however, means the end of the road for a star! A supernova is a much bigger and intrinsically much brighter event where the outer layers of a star are blown explosively into space! A star that goes supernova does not return to its previous brightness and may disappear completely, leaving an expanding supernova remnant behind!
The first recorded case of a supernova was observed by the Chinese recorded in the year 1054 CE. However, the supernova had occurred 6,523 years earlier because this star was that many light-years away. They called it a guest star and wrote that it was visible in daylight for a full three weeks, finally fading entirely from view about three months later.
However, we do see supernova remnants, expanding clouds in space where stars used to be! There are many examples of these clouds, both inside and outside our galaxy. The most famous supernova remnant visible from the Northern Hemisphere is the Crab Nebula. It’s located in the direction of the constellation Taurus the Bull.
The Crab Nebula is famous for containing the first known pulsar, discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. As it is known, the Crab pulsar is a neutron star or the remnant of the supernova that created the Crab Nebula. Like cosmic lighthouses, pulsars give off beams of radio waves as they spin!
Now, not all supernovas are the same! We can classify them based on how they explode, and we have the Type II and Type IA supernovas. Let’s start with the most popular one, the Type II supernova!
Type II happens when a star explodes due to old age. This supernova occurs when a giant star runs out of fuel, which brings it into a rapid collapse and explosion. Such a star is between eight and 40 times heavier than our sun! They are often referred to as core-collapse supernovae because that’s precisely what happens. The star’s core suddenly, like in just a few seconds, collapses in on itself!
To understand this phenomenon, here is how stars work. For billions of years during this star’s lifetime, nuclear fusion, the process by which hydrogen is converted into helium in the star’s interior. This process liberates enormous amounts of energy, thus enabling the star to shine.
However, the star fights an internal battle with gravity. This gravity is self-induced, but the star remains stable when an inexorable inward-pushing force of gravity is continually countering the outward-pushing radiation from fusion reactions in the star’s core.
But the hydrogen fuel eventually runs out, and when that happens, the star can no longer maintain its outward push against inward-pulling gravity. The star slowly starts to shrink. This shrinking has the effect of bringing more hydrogen from locations further out in the star into the region previously occupied by the core, sufficient hydrogen, in fact, for the nuclear fusion to resume in a shell around the star’s inner core. Eventually, the center can no longer hold, and the star explodes.
So what happens to the material flung into space in a supernova explosion, the remains of the star? It disperses gently over the eons, and its elements go toward forming new stars, new planets, perhaps even new life. All the atoms in your body were forged in the fiery hearts of ancient stars. The calcium in your bones. The iron in your blood. All were born in a massive red giant star and seeded across the universe in a supernova explosion billions of years ago.
Let’s come back to our sun. Can it go supernova on us? The sun has enough fuel to last 10 billion years, and if it were to go supernova, there is no hope for the Earth! We are too close for comfort. However, thankfully, the sun is not massive enough to become a supernova, despite its size!
Now that we know our sun will not go supernova on us, how much energy is produced during a Type II supernova? The unit of measure of this type of stupendous energy is FOE, meaning 10 followed by 51 zeroes! During the sun’s lifetime, it will emit approximately 1.2 FOE of energy! However, a