Hello everybody
This is a story about a planet and a star.
Separated by thousands of light-years, and managed to have one brief contact in 1054AD.
To help me tell this story, I have contacted my friend Parshati Patel and she is going to start us off.
Just like humans, we all know that stars have a life and death cycle.
But do all stars have the same fate?
Or do they all die when they explode or do they quietly?
It depends on the stars mass.
For a star like our sun it will not blow up essentially like a supernova, but it will all obviously blow off the outer layers, which means we are probably not going to be here to see it.
However stars when they’re massive, say 8 times more massive than our sun they will eventually blow up and die not so quiet life.
Now this explosion is giant enough to be actually brighter than an entire galaxy that’s host the star.
Now one of the most famous supernova remnants is crab nebula.
You might have seen pictures of it.
It’s 6,500 light-years away.
As a massive star’s core collapses under its own gravity.
When it cannot hold itself anymore, and that’s when an explosion occurs.
The people of Earth wouldn’t see this titanic explosion for thousands of years.
At this point the first inklings of the Bronze Age were beginning.
The first written words, the first Greek towns, and the first Egyptian dynasties were emerging.
The famous Otzi the Iceman gives us just a small idea of what this time was like for our species.
Alright, let’s step back.
Why did the star actually explode in the first place?
The star converts hydrogen into helium.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe.
So inside the core there is a lot of energy that is going into converting hydrogen into helium.
At some point, the core will run out of hydrogen and be completely made up of helium.
Now the process is going to repeat.
Helium core will now that to burn and convert helium into carbon.
This goes on until you reach iron.
Once you reach iron, the pressures and the temperatures are so high, that the core cannot hold itself so collapses under its own gravity.
This is when you get a large explosion and this large explosion not only explodes the core, and its surrounding core with basically looks like an onion shell.
But it also blows away all of its upper layers in its surroundings.
This is when you get these beautiful nebulae where you have different layers of a star being exploded and blown away from its central core.
This releases a lot of material and energy and this energy is high enough to generate elements that are higher than iron, which you do not form inside the star, but actually when the star dies.
The supernova reaching the earth was a truly global event.
In China, the supernova was called a guest star, and people from across the vast Song dynasty saw one more light in the night sky for over a year.
Astrologers like Song Huiyao, and Song Shi gave accounts of a new star just to the south-east of Tianguan.
In Japan, Fujiwara no Teika became obsessed with guest stars after observing a comet.
He too was able to find through diaries that no longer exist today, astronomical records of our supernova seen on the island of the rising sun.
In Constantinople, where Turkey is today, a Nestorian Christian doctor named Ibn Butlan wrote about the new star in the sky.
It wasn’t until the 13th century that his works were transcribed into Arabic by Uyun al-Anba.
Other suspected sightings include places such as Europe, Australia, and the Americas.
The native oral tradition of Australia has an account that some interpret as our supernova.
The same can be said about petroglyphs found in the American southwest.
So how do you actually detect these?
Using these current technologies to detect neutrinos which are formed when this core collapse occurs.
Now neutrinos arrive much earlier than when the light actually arrives.
Which means using our observations we can usually detect neutrinos way ahead of time way before the light of the supernova actually reaches earth.
This gives us hints ahead of time to begin looking for the supernova.
So when the light arrives we actually see the exploded part of the supernova and it actually sometimes is as bright as an entire galaxy and it can actually be seen with the naked eye.
The prorogation of this material actually create beautiful nebula and what we always see in the pictures are different colors which means there are different elements which are being shredded from the core of the star.
This material goes back to the interstellar medium, which is where the newest generation of stars are formed.
That is actually how we get all the material that is not hydrogen or helium around different stars like our sun.
After years of theorizing by astronomers, they determined this visitor in the 11th century was the famous Crab nebula.
The blur in the sky, a permanent reminder of our supernova.
The Hubble telescope is responsible for some of the most beautiful pictures in history.
When they sent back photos of the Crab nebula, we saw the final remains of that explosion that occurred so long ago.
a connection between vast spans of distance and time.
When we look up in the night sky, we aren’t seeing a far away cosmos separate from us.
What we see out there is as much part of nature as the forests and mountains.
We often hear about space as vast and far away, but sometimes the light of an explosion thousands of light-years away, can come to visit us for a spell.
Do you think that we should look at space as part of nature?
Let us know down below.
I want to thank my friend and real life astronomer Parshati Patel for her help in telling this story.
She actually has a podcast you should check out.
Link in the description!
Connect with me on twitter and facebook all down there as well.
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