• Question: When do you think the next big supernova visable to naked human eye will take place. Will it be in our lifetime? I am aware that there was recently a supernova called 1987a. Will there be another one like that soon?

    Asked by balletshoes1998 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 14 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      With the number of stars that we can see I assume it would be a totally random chance when the next one happens. I don’t think we know enough about the age of a lot of stars to really say when they’ll go nova.

      I might be wrong though, Karen or Nazim might know more.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      A lot of people talk about Betelguese (the red giant star which makes Orion’s armpit) going supernova “soon”, but soon is relative in astronomy – they just mean in the next million years or so (so probably not our lifetime). The constellation of Orion would look pretty weird without it though…

      A friend of mine who works at Oxford recently wrote about it. You might like to see what he said: http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/blog/astro-blog/2012/01/18/whats-going-to-happen-to-betelgeuse

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 14 Mar 2012:

      I love the idea that one might be doing it right now, but we won’t be able to tell for tens or hundreds of years. I wonder if there would be any warning signs before one went off though….

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      There could well be; there is a star called Eta Carinae that might just explode in our lifetimes. We are generally looking for enormous (millions of times brighter than our sun) stars which are near the end of their projected “burning” of fuel.

      There is a list on Wikipedia of really big, bright stars. These are all also quite young (a few million years) because the bigger and brighter they are now, the more quickly they use up their fuel, and these are the stars that can make the biggest explosions.

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