Stellaris D-33: The Death Star

[gluck3d]

I have just read an article about increased amount of alien Fe-60 isotope on some of the Earth zones/layers dated about 2-3 million years ago. This seem to be the result of some nearby super-nova bombardment. Also this matches with climate changes on Earth.

So I guess the answer is that super-nova explosion is not that terrific as Sun explosion, but may result in some changes to the Earth climate, which, in turn, may result in mass extinction, hunger etc. Still I hope that humanity has reached a good level of adaptability (thanks, science) to survive this...

 

[TheBeautifulVoid2]

That's amazing. Can you link me, please?

 

[gluck3d]

I have read it in Russian here - https://lenta.ru/news/2016/04/07/supernovae/
This is a review on article in Nature here - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v532/n7597/full/nature17196.html , but the full article is for subscribers only.

 

[TheBeautifulVoid2]

Thanks! I know some friends whose lab has Nature, and I shall ask them if I may read over their shoulder.

 

[Lucius Scaevola]

Today we're going to talk about a dead giant. Specifically, we're going to talk about a giant star which died a thousand years ago and left a truly beautiful, truly terrifying corpse behind.

Meet my second favourite thing in space, the Crab Nebula.


In the year AD 1054, Chinese, Arab and Japanese astronomers recorded a supernova which lasted approximately two years. At its height, from 4 to 27 July 1054, the Chinese astronomer Yang Weide recorded it as being visible even during the day and spent a lot of time trying to work out what it meant for the Emperor's reign. Europeans, apparently, didn't see anything. The dark ages must have been really dark.

In 1928, Edwin Hubble measured the Crab Nebula and discovered that it was expanding at a steady rate. He worked out this steady rate, extrapolated it backwards, and concluded that the Crab Nebula must be what's left of that supernova a thousand years before.

The Crab Nebula is big. How big? It's been expanding at 1500 kilometers a second for a thousand years. That's how big it is. This beautiful filigreed web of light is actually a colossal explosion bursting in every direction as fast as it can, fast enough that it would swallow the entire Solar system in a little over a month.

Sorry if the post is a bit old, but I felt like replying as a small piece of information has been left out causing your original post to be slightly flawed. While correct in most points, you have failed to mention the time light has taken to travel from this far off location and be seen by the medieval astronomers, much less by Mr. Hubble. Being 6,523 lightyears away, it has actually been quite a few millennia since this event occurred. If viewed from a closer perspective, the nebula would likely appear quite different from what we can see (because the view of the explosion would have progressed by thousands of years.) While this could never be implemented in a game like stellaris, it brings the very idea of faster than light travel into a better focus. Things you thought you would find after seeing them in a telescope could be long gone by the time you fly over to them, even with the tech featured in the game. I always feel like this give me a different understanding of the size of our universe when I think in this manner. I apologize if my post comes off as rude in any way, as this is not my intent. I merely wanted to impart a small perspective to the conversation.