RIGHT
New brains please

Just thinking about this is making my head hurt.

The opening sequence of Men in black (1,2 or 3?) where we are inside a marble being played with by aliens might just be the case.

A month ago GI said that it was more sand than stars!!!!

but they are all bigitude estimates.

"Everything is air-droppable at least once."

"When the going gets tough, the tough call for close air support."

It would not do that, but it certainly give us a good dose of X-rays and cosmic rays, remove the upper atmosphere and ionise whatever's left.

It is possible that an event such as this caused the extinctions that occurred at the end of the Permian, 245 million years ago.

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Most shooting stars you see in the sky are ice/dirt no larger than a grain of sand.

I think there have been a couple of instances (definitely one) of a humans witnessing a supernova and it being recorded.

Betelgeuse remains our best hope at seeing a supernova up close & if it does go bang it wont disrupt the earths orbit, we will however have two suns in the sky for about 3 to 4 weeks

Another interesting snippet, all the gold in the universe is forged in dying stars before being expelled out in a supernova, think about that the next time you put that piece of Jewellery on.
Also imagine how many times our pale blue dot would have been enriched with Gold deposits to get to where we are today.

Sex Panther 60% of the time it works every time

This is actually true for all elements heavier than nitrogen, and in fact all elements heavier than iron can only be produced in the explosion itself.

Main sequence stars produce energy by fusing hydrogen into helium and by doing so the radiative pressure they create keeps the outer layers of the star "up" and stop it from collapsing under its own mass.

When a star runs out of hydrogen it fuses the helium into carbon. When the helium runs out it fuses carbon into neon. Trouble is the heavier the fuel is the more s*** it is at producing energy because being heavier it requires more energy to shove the atoms together and fuse them. When the neon is all fused into oxygen it uses oxygen and makes silicon. Then it fuses silicon into iron.

Iron is the lightest element which requires more energy to fuse than can be obtained from the fusion so once it starts fusing iron it can't keep the outer layers from collapsing any more. They fall in and the shockwave blows the outer layers away, distributing the heavier elements in the outer layers of the star across space. The explosion also rams atoms together at high energies and allows loose neutrons to be captured and that makes the elements heavier than iron, including gold, lead, silver, and up to uranium. Eventually those atoms become part of interstellar clouds which condense to form new star systems, and some of them will turn up on its planets. Being heavy, much of the material will fall to the centre of a new planet (the Earth's core is substantially iron).

As well as providing us with many raw materials that are only manufactured in supernovae and their progenitors therefore supernovae also provide us with an iron core which is responsible for generating the Earth's magnetic field and without which radiation would reach the surface of the Earth and make it uninhabitable for complex forms of life.

Without supernovae therefore there would be no football.

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