this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I know it's overly pedantic to say this:
The sun can't go supernova because it hasn't finished fusing hydrogen. When it does finish, it will swell up to a red giant. This has to happen before it can explode, and the swelling process will take a very long time (in human terms).
The sun isn't big enough to go nova, period. It will swell up in ~5 billion years when it runs out of hydrogen in the core and starts burning helium. Then the sun will start climbing the fusion chain up to iron and there the fusion reaction in the core will die out. When this occurs the outer shell will kind of just slough away leaving a planetary nebula and an extremely hot naked mostly iron core. This core is a white dwarf and will just continue to glow for a few tens of billions of years until it loses all its heat. No fusion is happening in this bad boy it just glows from the residual heat and the heat is so hot it takes longer than the current age of the universe for that heat to dissipate.
Back to the original point though is that the sun won't explode in a supernova because it lacks the mass to do that. You need a star that is at least 8 times as massive as the sun in order to get a supernova.
The meme will be stale by then.
Secondly, would it even be possible to know in that the sun has exploded?
The meme says "in the 8 minutes it takes for the light to reach us" but that would also be the precise moment in which we learn of the explosion leaving us with no time to make memes.
Which leads me back to my initial question, how, if at all possible, could we setup an early (seconds/minutes) warning system for such an event?
Possibly some kind of quantum entangled alarm system in a lower orbit around the sun?
Completely tossing around BS of course, just an interesting thought experiment.
Quantum entanglement can't actually transmit information, it just looks like it can sometimes due to how quantum mechanics can get weird.
Get a red ball and a blue ball, and two boxes. Close your eyes and out one ball in each box. These box-balls are now "entangled", in that you know that the contents of one is not the content of the other.
Send a box to a different country, and open yours. You instantly know that the other ball is red, since yours is blue, but the holder of the other box knows nothing new.
With the QM, it the same basic setup except both particles are in an indeterminate state, and when you look you're making it "pick" which state it's in, and it also makes the other one "pick".
You can't force it to collapse one way or the other without breaking the entanglement either, so it'd be like red-blue ball, and when you force it to be red, the other ball now has a 50/50 chance of also being red.
My guess for the only way to get some warning would be if the supernova had some form of initial, not-cataclysmic flash or outgassing shortly beforehand.
Is that not just quantum superpositioning, which I thought was technically a separate, though possibly intertwined, concept?
Superposition is just the "it's in multiple states at once" part. Entanglement is the property of making how one particle comes out of superposition interrelated with how another one does.
Neutrino burst typically precedes a supernova, at least I remember reading that somewhere... Don't ask me where...
No and yes. If it happened instantaneously then no.
However, scientists are capable of predicting solar flares well in advance. They can do that by looking at what is happening on the surface of the sun. If it was about to explode, there'd likely be some kind of unusual activity there for several days prior to the explosion. The sun is also rather big. So even if aliens decided to blow it up unexpectedly, it'd probably take more than a few minutes for the explosion to engulf the entire sun, meaning that you would have time to send a meme before lights went out.
I'm not really sure what other purpose a warning system could have. There's no good place to hide if the sun goes out.
What if it happened at night? Then we'd be fine, right?
Okay, good. That makes me feel better.
Well, ya see he used that word IF. Admittedly it is doing some heavy lifting here, but... well, thanks for the science fact I guess.
Ostensibly another party would have done something to blow up our sun. Dark Forest Theory and all that. Can't have the rabble getting interstellar travel now can we?
Do you feel better having said it?
Yeah.
Well then I'm happy for you stranger