Quote: “Supernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in its galaxy. “It’s like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once," says Evans. If a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners, according to Evans- it would wreck the show," as he cheerfully puts it. But the universe is vast and supernovae are normally much too far away to harm us. In fact most are so unimaginably distant that their light reaches us as no more than the faintest twinkle.”
Question: My question about this excerpt is won’t our sun blow up as well? They say far into the future, when our sun is older, it will go through the supernova stage as well. However, this passage says for stars much BIGGER than our own. Another question I had is when did they learn about how these supernovas affect the galaxy? Seeing how we couldn’t be close to one to actually feel/see the impact.
Comment: I really enjoyed this excerpt because space and all of its wonders are amazing. I personally feel like this earth is huge, and we have so much to just discover on our planet. Now imagine this massive universe that we have only began to study. There is so much out there that we can learn about, and supernovas are just one of the many interesting phenomenon out there.
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