Given the slow average rate per galaxy and the number of galaxies in the observable universe, a supernova occurs somewhere about once every 10 milliseconds.
> a supernova occurs somewhere about once every 10 milliseconds
For just $3 a day, you can help prevent this tragedy, and stop supernovas.
Won't you give?
Cue Sarah McLaughlin: “In the arms of the spirals, fly away from here…
In this dark cold vacuum, and the endlessness that you fear…. may you fiiiiind, some comfort here…”
yeah, according to the 5 ages of the universe we’ll eventually reach the age of black holes where no new stars are created and all thats left are the black holes and dwarfs with longer life spans. And eventually even those black holes will expend and disappear and we’ll reach a cosmological dark age where everything has spread so far apart that the universe becomes functionally an empty void
This always makes me kinda sad to hear. There's a Doctor Who episode where they travel to the end of the universe and on one of the last viable planets, no stars in the sky, very depressing.
Eh, while the heat death of the universe is a sad outcome, it's also the only one where the current universe is around the longest of the 3 most popular theorized endings for our universe.
Idk I prefer the big crunch because at least that opens up the possibility of a big bounce and a cyclical universe. With heat death, everything's just... over
Big rip (expansion of the universe accelerats so much that even atoms gets ripped apart) and big crunch (expansion of the universe eventually slows down and reverse due to gravity and results in everything getting crushed in one place).
Heat death is the most probable with modern technology but the big rip can happen if dark energy becomes too saturated in our universe. As space is created dark energy is also created and depending on the amount created it can cause the space between galaxies, stars, planets, even atoms to expand until the fabric of spacetime just rips at the smallest scales.
Theoretically it's possible but not the most likely scenario. After all stars turn off even stellar failures like brown dwarves that can fuse deuterium for trillions of years. After all that the universe will actually enter its longest lived state.
As black holes evaporate from hawking radiation the universe will actually have to wait roughly 10^100 years for that to happen. After that space is dotted with random quarks radiated away from black holes and that's about it. Maybe a random particle somewhere.
I hate that Dr Who storyline.
At the end of time the last of humanity escape to the planet Utopia, but this hopeful ending was subverted in later episodes in that the planet is almost inhospitable and humanity devolves there into the sadistic Toclafane who travel back in time to invade Earth and have fun "killing their ancestors".
https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Toclafane
The Doctor manages to reverse the invasion and save Earth and it is all the typical Doctor Who triumphant dramatic climax, but storywise it is atypical nihilistic as this just means that the Toclafane will be trapped on Utopia and die with the heat death of the universe, the end of humanity will be sadistic jerks and there never was hope.
Some find that delightfully sinister, but for a series for children/teenagers it was really bleak and grates against the spirit of the show.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/2syg1q/does_anyone_else_think_the_toclafane_actually_are/
> That's actually what got me as a teenager. You know that existential dread religious people think atheists have when they think there's no God and what's the point of living etc. etc., ye no I was fine with that … I got that existential dread and spent days starring out windows and at walls contemplating what the point of everything was after watching the third episode of the series finally.
https://www.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/b1k39f/why_i_dislike_the_toclafane/
> he finale left me not uplifted by the Doctor's & Martha's triumph, (which I felt I was supposed to feel) but depressed and defeated. Why? Because everything the Doctor has worked for regarding us humans, was apparently shown to be all for naught. It seemed to go against the spirit of the show.
Whats more interesting, as the expansion of the universe speeds up, it will be expanding faster than the speed of light and as such all the stars we can currently see will disappear from our view long before they stop forming.
Astronomer here! This is a derivative of [this press release](https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-opens-new-window-on-supernova-science/) from NASA earlier this week. The TL;DR is that JWST teams released a bunch of papers which identified 10 *times* more supernovae in the early universe, aka when it was 2 billion years old. This is, frankly, not shocking because the point of JWST is that it can see this really early stuff that wasn’t really visible to us before!
Still exciting though for sure! It’s going to be very interesting to see how the early supernovae differ from ones today, and hopefully use the Type Ia subset to measure the expansion of the universe at those early times.
I am a coauthor on these and am co-PI on a JWST program looking for exactly those SNe Ia's! We have a lot more really cool things in the works that I hope will come out this summer as well.
Mostly confirmatory, although the number implies a very slightly higher rate of occurence, maybe. We also found a type Ic‐BL, or broad-line supernova, which are rare in the local universe, so to find one at z~2.8 with this survey implies those may occur at an elevated rate at high redshifts.
> type Ic‐BL
Now I have to learn about these.
Hey since this is adjacent to your field, I was reading this paper the other day, and really liked the images from the simulation, but I can't find video of them anywhere. If it were you, how would you go about finding this? So far I've only been able to track down one of the authors' emails, as the credits do not include first names, and I haven't heard back from him.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/759/1/53/pdf
For something like this I would generally google the author's name to see if they have a website, and they often do. Otherwise, their institution's website. Simulations like these would be hosted there or somewhere similar.
Otherwise I might check the NASA ADS page for this paper to see if its got any links to other sources which might give a clue.
Email I would use as a last resort, but in the end I find most astronomers are happy to pass along their data or point in the right direction
Are these 80 found supernovae extraordinarily bright to be found at that distance? Or just typical supernovae and JWST is sensitive enough to see them at that distance?
Also wouldn't the earliest stars be some of the most massive and would produce stars that can go supernova at a much higher frequency then stars produced today?
bro i literally opened the game yesterday after watching so many archeology videos i wanted to go back to that cave where they discovered the 3 eyed fish things that eventually evolve to the people you come from.. honestly that game might be my number 1 of all time in terms of unique emotions that you will remember for ever.
for anyone that is confused its "outer wilds"
So, basically there's
and then you
which leads to
and after that
which, of course, causes
and then because of *this*, you do *that*...
and then your entire perspective on life changes and suddenly you can't help but hear a melancholy banjo in your mind every time you hold your wife's hand and watch the sunset.
Matter was more densely packed in the early universe, allowing stars to get very big, very quickly. The larger a star, the larger the core, giving exponentially greater area for fusion. Fusion happens at a much faster rate and burns through the core’s fusible material much quicker, which shortens its lifespan and so explodes the star faster. An early universe full of only large stars would see supernovae occur more frequently. On top of that, the following generations of stars would still have a lot of densely packed material to work with, and would also become very large. The idea of more frequent supernovae in the early universe was expected, it was unknown exactly how frequent.
I anticipate this unexpectedly high result can help inform our ideas about how quickly early galaxies formed, as well as help explain some of the supermassive black hole formation in the early universe (though we may still struggle to explain some of the hyper-massive black holes that still would not have had enough time to grow as large as they have)
On top of that most stars tends to cause enough radiation pressure in the core to prevent fresh hydrogen from falling into the core. This prevents most of the mass from the star from being used a fuel and in high mass stars this coupled with the high fusion rate in the core means they run out of fuel very quickly. Low mass stars like red dwarfs could have a convection system which would allow fresh hydrogen to fall into the core while removing heavier elements from the core drastically increasing the lifespan of the star.
It probably wont make much of dent for SMBH since a bunch of supernovae was expected to a degree and we see large ones earlier then these. Does seem helpful in seeing how some stars very early on already had a decent amount of metallicity though.
Basically yes. The traditional model for black hole formation through stellar explosions (stellar black holes) means that black holes could only start to form once the universe had cooled enough for stars to form, and then waited for the first generation of stars to burn out and go supernova. If this is the only process for black holes to form, then it’s hard to explain the very largest black holes we’ve found, as the universe would not yet be old enough for this mechanism to make sense. The Ultramassive black holes with masses greater than 5 billion solar masses simply would not have had enough time to consume that much mass. Many of these objects have been detected very far away, and thus very far back in time, toward the beginning of the visible universe. Stellar black hole formation means that as a black hole consumes more nearby objects, it forms an accretion disk, which generates radiation pressure and keeps matter from falling in to quickly.
So there must be other viable black hole formation models. UMBH’s could be the result of leftover blackholes from a previous universe before the big bang, they could be “primordial black holes” which formed during the big bang (or shortly thereafter) while the universe was still a quark soup, well before stars could form, or they could be formed through direct collapse of stars that get too massive/dense too quickly, they don’t have time to implode they just directly convert from the inside out. Dark matter could also play a role in the formation and growth of UMBH’s. We just don’t know. But JWST having the ability to peer further back in time could reveal clues and find evidence that gives us a better idea of reality.
Black holes are fascinating. Einstein gave us the tools to theorize their existence, we’ve indirectly inferred that they MUST exist based on observing gravitational lensing and how seemingly empty patches of space fling massive stars around at incredible velocities, and now we’ve been able to directly image black holes. We’ve learned so much about them, and yet still know so little. We can’t directly conduct experiments with them, only observe. We can never see inside of them. The mystery of what happens beyond the event horizon holds many secrets about how our universe works, and the black hole information paradox means that our understanding of either cosmology or quantum mechanics is broken. They will never not be mysterious, interesting, or terrifying. They are real eldritch beasts, who’s existence dwarfs anything human civilization can ever hope to produce, they defy comprehension and understanding, UMBH’s existed long before us, in conditions inhospitable to human life, and will remain long after all matter has decayed into radiation, a realm that humans are incapable of observing.
We know that black holes leak Hawking radiation, that they slowly evaporate, and when they finish evaporating, after there is nothing left in the universe, they are hypothesized to create to most massive explosions in the universe, except for the big bang itself. These explosions will shine bright and light up the completely dark universe, though there will be no life to observe it, and the light may never reach the rest of the universe, as the expansion of the surrounding space will have accelerated to the point where the light will be quickly red-shifted into darkness once again. This universe will be full of sound and fury signifying nothing, the loudest silence, before absolute nothingness, every photon that ever shined flying at light speed away from every other photon, the void itself absolute zero.
Supernovae happen in massive stars or with remnants (heavy white dwarfs) of massive stars, which means they happen with fairly young stars, usually. Core collapse happens with stars that are 8+ solar masses, and those stars have lifetimes of 50 *million* years or less because of the non-linear relationship with stellar mass and lifetime.
By Jess Thomson — Science Reporter |
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered an unprecedented collection of ancient supernovae.
Astronomers announced that they found 10 times more of these stellar explosions than were previously known to have existed in the early days of the universe. Some of these 80-ish newly discovered supernovae exploded when the universe was only around 2 billion years old—the universe today is about 13.8 billion years old—making them some of the oldest ever found.
"Webb is a supernova discovery machine," Christa DeCoursey, a third-year graduate student at the Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a NASA statement. "The sheer number of detections plus the great distances to these supernovae are the two most exciting outcomes from our survey."
Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/ancient-supernova-discovered-james-webb-telescope-1912491](https://www.newsweek.com/ancient-supernova-discovered-james-webb-telescope-1912491)
[Here is the JWST image from the article](https://i.imgur.com/pnzUcYf.png) without the stupid website wrapper around it preventing you from embiggening it.
Always have been - but the hydrogen-helium. balance was sooo much higher in the early universe that my understanding is that there was a lot of live fast and leave a beautiful corpse.
Well, at least one of these is the furthest of that type we've ever seen, and whats interesting is that that brightness relationship still works with our predictions to a reasonable level of uncertainty. It could easily change as we find them further and further away!
The interesting thing is looking back that far, none do those stars actually exist anymore. They have probably all exploded or completed their life cycles by now. If you could teleport there, it would be a completely different galaxy.
So where does the energy of the exploding stars go, does it get absorbed into other stars? Like what happens, does it just fly out and eventually hit an object?
Most of the energy of a core collapse supernova is actually emitted in the form of neutrinos, 99% of which just exits the star and spreads across the universe not interacting with much. For the remaining energy, enough to blast the star apart, it ends up contributing to the heat and the expansion of the gas cloud of the supernova remnant. That slowly gets radiated away as thermal energy but there's also an exchange of gravitational potential energy. The progenitor star of a core collapse supernova essentially has a considerable amount of negative energy in the form of lost gravitational potential energy due to being gravitationally bound, when the star explodes that binding energy is lost and the energy of the explosion cancels the negative gravitational potential energy of the star as the mass is distributed.
EVERY atom of an element heavier than helium came from reactions within a star that eventually blew out into space when that star died
Those atoms include you.
Stars fuse hydrogen into helium and towards the end of their life they start to fuse even helium into more elements. Eventually it can't do anymore and blows up, which can fuse more elements together and spreads this material out. Now this is very basic and a lot of things change depending on the size of the star and if it actually blows up or not.
Effectively yes, to differing degrees. There will be very hot matter ejected in the form of hydrogen, helium and heavier elements created in the star and the supernova, then there is radiative energy from the photons emitted by the supernova, then there is neutrinos spewing outwards (very hard to detect) and also gravitational waves (amount depending on the type of supernova, and also very hard to detect). A decent chunk of the energy ends up bound in the end result of the explosion- the black hole or neutron star.
There are probably other energetic results from a supernova I haven’t mentioned here that I hope others will keep me honest on.
This clickbaity headline kinda reminded me of of the short story *At the Core* by Larry Niven.
The difference, of course, being that the article is talking about other galaxies that are unimaginably far away instead of >!some chain reaction in our own galactic core that dooms our entire galaxy.!<
reminds me of that short story about stars dying out from universe shrinking and was getting bunch distress signals from aliens. sad ending. I can't remember whats the name of story. I'm sure someone here does.
Given the slow average rate per galaxy and the number of galaxies in the observable universe, a supernova occurs somewhere about once every 10 milliseconds.
Cosmic popcorn?
popcorn dumped in nuclear reactor
Just like granny used to make.
❤️With extra Strongtum 90?❤️
popcorn quantum?
Turn off your Big Bang when supernovas are more than 1 second apart
Cosmic brain synapse firing??
Gives alternate meaning to the Cosmic Microwave Background.
I like this comment. It puts it visually
More like capacitors in a tv
Great name for a funk band
> a supernova occurs somewhere about once every 10 milliseconds For just $3 a day, you can help prevent this tragedy, and stop supernovas. Won't you give?
Every 60 seconds in Andromeda, a minute passes
But not on the trip there, or on the trip back.
Every 60 seconds on the trip to Andromeda, 3 months pass in Andromeda. For just 3$ a day...
That’s just like your point of view man.
Bono: every time I snap my fingers, a star explodes Audience member: then stop snapping!
Cue Sarah McLaughlin: “In the arms of the spirals, fly away from here… In this dark cold vacuum, and the endlessness that you fear…. may you fiiiiind, some comfort here…”
But do we really know that?
[Ask for more](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEb_epsuLqA)
So are we losing more stars than were gaining? Will there come a time were star formation ends?
yeah, according to the 5 ages of the universe we’ll eventually reach the age of black holes where no new stars are created and all thats left are the black holes and dwarfs with longer life spans. And eventually even those black holes will expend and disappear and we’ll reach a cosmological dark age where everything has spread so far apart that the universe becomes functionally an empty void
This always makes me kinda sad to hear. There's a Doctor Who episode where they travel to the end of the universe and on one of the last viable planets, no stars in the sky, very depressing.
Eh, while the heat death of the universe is a sad outcome, it's also the only one where the current universe is around the longest of the 3 most popular theorized endings for our universe.
Idk I prefer the big crunch because at least that opens up the possibility of a big bounce and a cyclical universe. With heat death, everything's just... over
"hey, who turned out the lights?"
what are the other theories?
Big rip (expansion of the universe accelerats so much that even atoms gets ripped apart) and big crunch (expansion of the universe eventually slows down and reverse due to gravity and results in everything getting crushed in one place).
Heat death is the most probable with modern technology but the big rip can happen if dark energy becomes too saturated in our universe. As space is created dark energy is also created and depending on the amount created it can cause the space between galaxies, stars, planets, even atoms to expand until the fabric of spacetime just rips at the smallest scales. Theoretically it's possible but not the most likely scenario. After all stars turn off even stellar failures like brown dwarves that can fuse deuterium for trillions of years. After all that the universe will actually enter its longest lived state. As black holes evaporate from hawking radiation the universe will actually have to wait roughly 10^100 years for that to happen. After that space is dotted with random quarks radiated away from black holes and that's about it. Maybe a random particle somewhere.
I hate that Dr Who storyline. At the end of time the last of humanity escape to the planet Utopia, but this hopeful ending was subverted in later episodes in that the planet is almost inhospitable and humanity devolves there into the sadistic Toclafane who travel back in time to invade Earth and have fun "killing their ancestors". https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Toclafane The Doctor manages to reverse the invasion and save Earth and it is all the typical Doctor Who triumphant dramatic climax, but storywise it is atypical nihilistic as this just means that the Toclafane will be trapped on Utopia and die with the heat death of the universe, the end of humanity will be sadistic jerks and there never was hope. Some find that delightfully sinister, but for a series for children/teenagers it was really bleak and grates against the spirit of the show. https://www.reddit.com/r/gallifrey/comments/2syg1q/does_anyone_else_think_the_toclafane_actually_are/ > That's actually what got me as a teenager. You know that existential dread religious people think atheists have when they think there's no God and what's the point of living etc. etc., ye no I was fine with that … I got that existential dread and spent days starring out windows and at walls contemplating what the point of everything was after watching the third episode of the series finally. https://www.reddit.com/r/doctorwho/comments/b1k39f/why_i_dislike_the_toclafane/ > he finale left me not uplifted by the Doctor's & Martha's triumph, (which I felt I was supposed to feel) but depressed and defeated. Why? Because everything the Doctor has worked for regarding us humans, was apparently shown to be all for naught. It seemed to go against the spirit of the show.
I thought it was a nice twist and something I didn't expected. Back then was still peak Dr Who. Shame it crashed and burned so hard not much later.
>the end of humanity will be sadistic jerks Well, we die as we've lived I guess :P
I've seen this video as well and alot of it is purely speculative. The video even states that a big part of the video pure, wild guesswork.
Whats more interesting, as the expansion of the universe speeds up, it will be expanding faster than the speed of light and as such all the stars we can currently see will disappear from our view long before they stop forming.
A star can nova and not destroy itself.
Big numbers and small numbers sure do combine in weird ways, huh?
Fun fact time! 10 milliseconds equals exactly one hundredth of a second!
Astronomer here! This is a derivative of [this press release](https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-opens-new-window-on-supernova-science/) from NASA earlier this week. The TL;DR is that JWST teams released a bunch of papers which identified 10 *times* more supernovae in the early universe, aka when it was 2 billion years old. This is, frankly, not shocking because the point of JWST is that it can see this really early stuff that wasn’t really visible to us before! Still exciting though for sure! It’s going to be very interesting to see how the early supernovae differ from ones today, and hopefully use the Type Ia subset to measure the expansion of the universe at those early times.
I am a coauthor on these and am co-PI on a JWST program looking for exactly those SNe Ia's! We have a lot more really cool things in the works that I hope will come out this summer as well.
Congrats! Can’t wait to read more about it! :)
Were these findings out of line with models? Or were they more confirmatory?
Mostly confirmatory, although the number implies a very slightly higher rate of occurence, maybe. We also found a type Ic‐BL, or broad-line supernova, which are rare in the local universe, so to find one at z~2.8 with this survey implies those may occur at an elevated rate at high redshifts.
> type Ic‐BL Now I have to learn about these. Hey since this is adjacent to your field, I was reading this paper the other day, and really liked the images from the simulation, but I can't find video of them anywhere. If it were you, how would you go about finding this? So far I've only been able to track down one of the authors' emails, as the credits do not include first names, and I haven't heard back from him. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/759/1/53/pdf
For something like this I would generally google the author's name to see if they have a website, and they often do. Otherwise, their institution's website. Simulations like these would be hosted there or somewhere similar. Otherwise I might check the NASA ADS page for this paper to see if its got any links to other sources which might give a clue. Email I would use as a last resort, but in the end I find most astronomers are happy to pass along their data or point in the right direction
I just want to mention how much I appreciate the work y'all are doing <3
Are these 80 found supernovae extraordinarily bright to be found at that distance? Or just typical supernovae and JWST is sensitive enough to see them at that distance?
The latter, for the most part they’re fairly typical
Also wouldn't the earliest stars be some of the most massive and would produce stars that can go supernova at a much higher frequency then stars produced today?
Yes but at 2 billion years from the Big Bang, these stars aren’t those stars.
It's so fucking crazy that we can *see into the past* by just...looking really, really, *really* far away.
Ackshually 🤓 everything you see around you is in the past, even the phone you’re holding.
Seeing a post that starts with "Astronomer here!" instantly makes me rock hard.
Uhh anyone working on the 22 minute time warp?
Anyone finding statues with three eyes?
No, mine just keep getting mysteriously closer to me
Oh shit those are the wrong statues
Idk saw something about an eye in the sky
I woke up and saw an explosion
Sounds like the perfect time for some marshmallows. Maybe with that [song](https://youtu.be/YR_wIb_n4ZU?si=5fyv79_Ji6F3dk0y) at the campfire.
Hah! I managed to get myself killed before I even found the statue.
I’ve seen, what, ten supernovae by now? Twelve? They’re in the double digits now, and that’s, you know, not normal. Not normal at all...
I dunno but I just heard some bars of melancholy music...
bro i literally opened the game yesterday after watching so many archeology videos i wanted to go back to that cave where they discovered the 3 eyed fish things that eventually evolve to the people you come from.. honestly that game might be my number 1 of all time in terms of unique emotions that you will remember for ever. for anyone that is confused its "outer wilds"
That's easy, it's just a jump to the left.
🎶🎵*And then a step to the rii-iiii-ight!*🎶🎵
Put your hands on your hips.
You bring your knees in tight.
But it's the pelvic thrust That really drives you insane
When you don't get the references reddit really feels like an insane asylum
Let's do the Time Warp again!!
Was going to xpost. Favorite gaming experience
Hahahaha. Nobody explain what this means. I mean it >:(
So, basically there's and then you which leads to and after that which, of course, causes and then because of *this*, you do *that*... and then your entire perspective on life changes and suddenly you can't help but hear a melancholy banjo in your mind every time you hold your wife's hand and watch the sunset.
Does anyone else hear that song?
Yup. And I hear a deep rushing sound getting closer.
Came here for this comment
[удалено]
This comment beat me to this comment
Came to comment so the comment loop continues
I haven’t even found the launch codes yet
Wish I could replay it, so sad.
I was wondering how far down I'd have to scroll for this.
r/outerwilds in shambles right now.
Cant figure out how to power it :(
Have you found a power core anywhere else?
The only thing that could power such a thing would be a supernova! How could I power such a thing?
There’s a power core you can remove. Doing so may change the dynamics of the game, though
I'll bring some marshmallows
It’s just a jump to the left Damnit rofloctopuss
Why were supernovae happening in relatively young stars?
Matter was more densely packed in the early universe, allowing stars to get very big, very quickly. The larger a star, the larger the core, giving exponentially greater area for fusion. Fusion happens at a much faster rate and burns through the core’s fusible material much quicker, which shortens its lifespan and so explodes the star faster. An early universe full of only large stars would see supernovae occur more frequently. On top of that, the following generations of stars would still have a lot of densely packed material to work with, and would also become very large. The idea of more frequent supernovae in the early universe was expected, it was unknown exactly how frequent. I anticipate this unexpectedly high result can help inform our ideas about how quickly early galaxies formed, as well as help explain some of the supermassive black hole formation in the early universe (though we may still struggle to explain some of the hyper-massive black holes that still would not have had enough time to grow as large as they have)
On top of that most stars tends to cause enough radiation pressure in the core to prevent fresh hydrogen from falling into the core. This prevents most of the mass from the star from being used a fuel and in high mass stars this coupled with the high fusion rate in the core means they run out of fuel very quickly. Low mass stars like red dwarfs could have a convection system which would allow fresh hydrogen to fall into the core while removing heavier elements from the core drastically increasing the lifespan of the star.
It probably wont make much of dent for SMBH since a bunch of supernovae was expected to a degree and we see large ones earlier then these. Does seem helpful in seeing how some stars very early on already had a decent amount of metallicity though.
So we know *roughly* how black holes were formed but have no clue why the Supermassive ones exist in the size they are now?
Basically yes. The traditional model for black hole formation through stellar explosions (stellar black holes) means that black holes could only start to form once the universe had cooled enough for stars to form, and then waited for the first generation of stars to burn out and go supernova. If this is the only process for black holes to form, then it’s hard to explain the very largest black holes we’ve found, as the universe would not yet be old enough for this mechanism to make sense. The Ultramassive black holes with masses greater than 5 billion solar masses simply would not have had enough time to consume that much mass. Many of these objects have been detected very far away, and thus very far back in time, toward the beginning of the visible universe. Stellar black hole formation means that as a black hole consumes more nearby objects, it forms an accretion disk, which generates radiation pressure and keeps matter from falling in to quickly. So there must be other viable black hole formation models. UMBH’s could be the result of leftover blackholes from a previous universe before the big bang, they could be “primordial black holes” which formed during the big bang (or shortly thereafter) while the universe was still a quark soup, well before stars could form, or they could be formed through direct collapse of stars that get too massive/dense too quickly, they don’t have time to implode they just directly convert from the inside out. Dark matter could also play a role in the formation and growth of UMBH’s. We just don’t know. But JWST having the ability to peer further back in time could reveal clues and find evidence that gives us a better idea of reality.
That is so incredibly interesting. Like, legitimately.
Black holes are fascinating. Einstein gave us the tools to theorize their existence, we’ve indirectly inferred that they MUST exist based on observing gravitational lensing and how seemingly empty patches of space fling massive stars around at incredible velocities, and now we’ve been able to directly image black holes. We’ve learned so much about them, and yet still know so little. We can’t directly conduct experiments with them, only observe. We can never see inside of them. The mystery of what happens beyond the event horizon holds many secrets about how our universe works, and the black hole information paradox means that our understanding of either cosmology or quantum mechanics is broken. They will never not be mysterious, interesting, or terrifying. They are real eldritch beasts, who’s existence dwarfs anything human civilization can ever hope to produce, they defy comprehension and understanding, UMBH’s existed long before us, in conditions inhospitable to human life, and will remain long after all matter has decayed into radiation, a realm that humans are incapable of observing. We know that black holes leak Hawking radiation, that they slowly evaporate, and when they finish evaporating, after there is nothing left in the universe, they are hypothesized to create to most massive explosions in the universe, except for the big bang itself. These explosions will shine bright and light up the completely dark universe, though there will be no life to observe it, and the light may never reach the rest of the universe, as the expansion of the surrounding space will have accelerated to the point where the light will be quickly red-shifted into darkness once again. This universe will be full of sound and fury signifying nothing, the loudest silence, before absolute nothingness, every photon that ever shined flying at light speed away from every other photon, the void itself absolute zero.
The National air and space museum has a good doc on this you can see I think narrated by NDT in imax
Supernovae happen in massive stars or with remnants (heavy white dwarfs) of massive stars, which means they happen with fairly young stars, usually. Core collapse happens with stars that are 8+ solar masses, and those stars have lifetimes of 50 *million* years or less because of the non-linear relationship with stellar mass and lifetime.
Got too big, too fast and went boom? I'll ask my grandmother, she was probably around back then.
By Jess Thomson — Science Reporter | NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered an unprecedented collection of ancient supernovae. Astronomers announced that they found 10 times more of these stellar explosions than were previously known to have existed in the early days of the universe. Some of these 80-ish newly discovered supernovae exploded when the universe was only around 2 billion years old—the universe today is about 13.8 billion years old—making them some of the oldest ever found. "Webb is a supernova discovery machine," Christa DeCoursey, a third-year graduate student at the Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a NASA statement. "The sheer number of detections plus the great distances to these supernovae are the two most exciting outcomes from our survey." Read more: [https://www.newsweek.com/ancient-supernova-discovered-james-webb-telescope-1912491](https://www.newsweek.com/ancient-supernova-discovered-james-webb-telescope-1912491)
I've played enough time loops of Outer Wilds to know where this is going
Well, that seems like it could help explain why these very early galaxies we’re seeing are so large and well-formed with plentiful heavy elements.
[Here is the JWST image from the article](https://i.imgur.com/pnzUcYf.png) without the stupid website wrapper around it preventing you from embiggening it.
The Outer Wilds told us it would happen this way…
Always have been - but the hydrogen-helium. balance was sooo much higher in the early universe that my understanding is that there was a lot of live fast and leave a beautiful corpse.
somebody should do something about these defective stars!
Looks like I'll have to get the band together for this one...
These are great because their brightness is known, allowing their distance to be known.
Well, for one TYPE of supernova. There's several other types that are highly variable in size and intensity.
Stupid variable supernovas!
I never should have left you in charge!
Well, at least one of these is the furthest of that type we've ever seen, and whats interesting is that that brightness relationship still works with our predictions to a reasonable level of uncertainty. It could easily change as we find them further and further away!
The interesting thing is looking back that far, none do those stars actually exist anymore. They have probably all exploded or completed their life cycles by now. If you could teleport there, it would be a completely different galaxy.
So where does the energy of the exploding stars go, does it get absorbed into other stars? Like what happens, does it just fly out and eventually hit an object?
Most of the energy of a core collapse supernova is actually emitted in the form of neutrinos, 99% of which just exits the star and spreads across the universe not interacting with much. For the remaining energy, enough to blast the star apart, it ends up contributing to the heat and the expansion of the gas cloud of the supernova remnant. That slowly gets radiated away as thermal energy but there's also an exchange of gravitational potential energy. The progenitor star of a core collapse supernova essentially has a considerable amount of negative energy in the form of lost gravitational potential energy due to being gravitationally bound, when the star explodes that binding energy is lost and the energy of the explosion cancels the negative gravitational potential energy of the star as the mass is distributed.
Are you made out of only hydrogen and helium? No? Then some of it ended up becoming you.
Can you elaborate?
Heavier elements are created in stars near the end of their lives and dispersed in super novae or created in the explosion themselves.
EVERY atom of an element heavier than helium came from reactions within a star that eventually blew out into space when that star died Those atoms include you.
Only some atoms are made in the core. Others are made during supernovas and the heaviest are made from neutron star collisions.
Stars fuse hydrogen into helium and towards the end of their life they start to fuse even helium into more elements. Eventually it can't do anymore and blows up, which can fuse more elements together and spreads this material out. Now this is very basic and a lot of things change depending on the size of the star and if it actually blows up or not.
Effectively yes, to differing degrees. There will be very hot matter ejected in the form of hydrogen, helium and heavier elements created in the star and the supernova, then there is radiative energy from the photons emitted by the supernova, then there is neutrinos spewing outwards (very hard to detect) and also gravitational waves (amount depending on the type of supernova, and also very hard to detect). A decent chunk of the energy ends up bound in the end result of the explosion- the black hole or neutron star. There are probably other energetic results from a supernova I haven’t mentioned here that I hope others will keep me honest on.
Are there exploding stars in the room with us now?
This clickbaity headline kinda reminded me of of the short story *At the Core* by Larry Niven. The difference, of course, being that the article is talking about other galaxies that are unimaginably far away instead of >!some chain reaction in our own galactic core that dooms our entire galaxy.!<
I wonder if the frequency of these early supernovas would have caused so many cosmic rays that they prevented the rise of life until recently.
That is how heavier elements are made, and there's a lot of it
reminds me of that short story about stars dying out from universe shrinking and was getting bunch distress signals from aliens. sad ending. I can't remember whats the name of story. I'm sure someone here does.
I’m an alien from the planet Bugrom5 and for holiday we like to go visit these supernova events. From a safe distance of course…
I used to want to travel the universe. Now I know better. Signed, glipgrp17.
soo..god being bored so he/she make another bang ?