It's 640 light years away (give or take).
Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario?
I would imagine that it'd be hellishly bright in the night sky.
What does science say about it? I'm rusty on my astronomy, but it'd be awesome to see.
Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario?
Please, please tell me this was a joke. Please tell me you actually understood what a neutrino is, and were intentionally posting something absurd.
In the off-chance you were serious, a neutrino doesn't interact with matter enough to do any damage. This is not a matter of any uncertainty. A single neutrino would have a chance of passing through several light years of solid lead without interacting with a single atom. Neutrinos are sleeting through your body right now from the centre of the sun; they pass
Like I said, I've been a bit rusty on astronomy (add physics to that, too) for a while now.
I was actually referring to a book (more then likely outdated, it was from the 80s) that referred to a scenario where a supergiant star the distance of Alpha Centuari from us going supernova.
A supergiant going nova that close could be bad. Neutrinos wouldn't be the problem however - more likely it would be x-rays or gamma rays that would do Bad Things(TM) to the planet.
As mentioned elsewhere, there is some question as to whether observed long duration gamma ray bursts are the product of dying stars collapsing into a black hole. If that theory is correct, the final moments of a supergiant's demise produce two "jets" of gamma rays going in polar opposite directs - the "burst" is actually a far away beam that we're coincidentally in the path of. An unlikely event to be sure, but statistically not impossible, and given a large enough sample size of stars, we're bound to see a few.
The thing is, we see those events intergalacticly - stars dying in other galaxies produce GRBs visible here. Which should tell you how much energy they pack. At closer range, we'd be royally screwed. Though if such events were statistically likely, you'd expect life on earth to have been snuffed out repeatedly these past four billenia, which it has not been. There are a world of assumptions in that scenario, some of which may be disproved in the future.
New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:5, Informative)
Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario?
Please, please tell me this was a joke. Please tell me you actually understood what a neutrino is, and were intentionally posting something absurd.
In the off-chance you were serious, a neutrino doesn't interact with matter enough to do any damage. This is not a matter of any uncertainty. A single neutrino would have a chance of passing through several light years of solid lead without interacting with a single atom. Neutrinos are sleeting through your body right now from the centre of the sun; they pass
Re: (Score:1)
Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score:2)
Ah, ok.
A supergiant going nova that close could be bad. Neutrinos wouldn't be the problem however - more likely it would be x-rays or gamma rays that would do Bad Things(TM) to the planet.
As mentioned elsewhere, there is some question as to whether observed long duration gamma ray bursts are the product of dying stars collapsing into a black hole. If that theory is correct, the final moments of a supergiant's demise produce two "jets" of gamma rays going in polar opposite directs - the "burst" is actually a far away beam that we're coincidentally in the path of. An unlikely event to be sure, but statistically not impossible, and given a large enough sample size of stars, we're bound to see a few.
The thing is, we see those events intergalacticly - stars dying in other galaxies produce GRBs visible here. Which should tell you how much energy they pack. At closer range, we'd be royally screwed. Though if such events were statistically likely, you'd expect life on earth to have been snuffed out repeatedly these past four billenia, which it has not been. There are a world of assumptions in that scenario, some of which may be disproved in the future.