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When a massive star dies, it explodes as a supernova. In a short period of time it becomes incredibly bright. But what exactly causes this phenomenon? For a long time this remained a mystery. Scientists cannot look inside the star, so the only way to answer the question is to simulate the explosion using a supercomputer.

It begins at the very end of a star’s life cycle: having consumed all its hydrogen, it begins to shrink. An iron core is formed in its center, the matter in which is destroyed under the influence of gravity. And a neutron star is formed in the core; it has the size of a city, but contains more matter than the Sun.

Physicists believe that the collapsing matter hits the center, sending a massive shock wave that reflects outward, but encounters more collapsing matter along the way and is unable to escape the core.

Tiny irregularities in the surface of matter can quickly amplify into massive vibrations. They manifest themselves in the fact that matter glides around the neutron star like a liquid. Meanwhile, neutrinos, particles produced in a neutron star, greatly heat the surrounding matter, causing it to erupt. Intense heating from the neutrino plus pressure from the moving matter displaces the shock wave. The wave accelerates and the star explodes. And although the explosion itself lasts less than half a second, the shock wave can take up to a day to reach the surface of the star.

Ecology of life. A star can die in many ways, but people usually think of stars as exploding. The term "supernova" describes explosions that release large amounts of energy when certain stars reach a certain stage of development

A star can die in many ways, but people usually think of stars exploding.

The term "supernova" describes explosions that release large amounts of energy when certain stars reach a certain stage of development. Supernovae can shine brighter than entire galaxies and destroy everything within a hundred light years of them. But supernovae are not just amazing natural phenomena. These are the most important phenomena necessary for the development of complex matter, including life.

Search for supernovae by astronomers

Let's start with how supernovae occur. When enough gas accumulates in one place, its mass begins to exert a gravitational effect, focused at the center of the cloud. When the pressure exceeds a certain limit, the hydrogen atoms in the center of the sphere begin to undergo fusion, igniting the gas and turning it into a star. But throughout the life of a star and its combustion, there is a counteraction between the pressure of the temperature reaction, directed outward, and gravitational compression, directed inward.

Over billions of years of combustion, the outward pressure decreases, but the gravitational force remains approximately the same. Therefore, as small and medium-sized stars cool, gravity begins to win over them - but since these stars are not very large, gravity does nothing other than hold matter together. Such a safely cooled star is called a white dwarf. The mass limit required for a supernova to occur is called the Chandrasekhar limit, and is approximately 1.4 solar masses. If the star is smaller, it will go out peacefully.

Supernovae are so bright that they stand out even against the background of galaxies.

At the same time, a white dwarf can still light up at the end of its life. In principle, such stars can be rekindled. It can attract enough mass to itself that the pressure in the center increases greatly, and carbon synthesis begins. Then an unstable fusion reaction will begin, which will lead to an explosion.

Or, if the core of the white dwarf consists mainly of neon, its core will collapse, which will also lead to an explosion - but only after it a neutron star will remain. This almost always happens in binary systems, in which one star approaches the Chandrasekhar limit, sucking matter from its partner. Since astronomers cannot study the contents of the star's core, they do not know which of the two paths its development will take.

Stars more massive than 1.4 solar masses have a different life cycle. The red giant burns slowly, with its gravity strong enough to cause a core collapse and a supernova explosion. Stars between 1.4 and 3 solar masses collapse into neutron stars.

Heavier stars also collapse, but they don't stop until they turn into a black hole. This is quite a rare event. Although there are a lot of black holes in the Universe, there are far fewer of them than other types of stellar remnants.

Supernovae can appear in other ways. For example, although most white dwarfs gain mass slowly, some stars can experience a rapid increase in mass (for example, from a collision with another star) and quickly pass the Chandrasekhar limit - so quickly that they do not have time to begin to collapse.

Supernovae have several uses for astronomy. For example, type Ia supernovae (a white dwarf that has undergone carbon fusion) send uniform signals into space. Therefore, they are dubbed "standard candles" because they serve as scientists' standards for optical measurements. True, recent research suggests that these candles are not as standard as previously thought.

But the point was that supernovae are not only cool and useful phenomena. To create elements heavier than carbon and neon, ordinary stars are not suitable. Only supernovas, dying stars, can cope with this.

Almost everything we deal with was at some point thrown out by a star in the final moments of its life. The Earth is a rocky collection of remains ejected by a supernova. And also all comets, asteroids and everything else consisting of heavier matter. And we ourselves, consisting of matter taken from the Earth, are created from the debris of a supernova. published

Supernova explosion

Let us now turn to the phenomenon supernova- one of the most grandiose cosmic phenomena. In short, a supernova is a real explosion of a star, when most of its mass (or even all) is thrown at a speed of up to 10 thousand km/s into space, and the remaining central part collapses into a super-dense neutron star or even a black hole. Supernovae play a fundamental role in the evolution of stars, being the “finale” of the life of stars with masses of more than 8-10 solar masses, giving birth to neutron stars and black holes and enriching the interstellar medium with heavy chemical elements (almost all chemical elements heavier than oxygen were once formed in the explosion of some some massive star.

Isn’t this the answer to humanity’s eternal craving for the stars? After all, in the smallest blood of living matter there are iron atoms, each of which was synthesized during the death of a massive star, and in this sense, people are akin to that snowman from the fairy tale of G.-H. Andersen, who experienced an inexplicable love for a hot stove, because his basis was a poker...). According to their observable characteristics, supernovae are usually divided into 2 broad classes - supernovae of the 1st and 2nd types.

In Spetry type 1 supernovae there are no hydrogen lines, the dependence of their brightness on time (the so-called light curve) almost does not change from supernova to supernova, the luminosity at maximum brightness is approximately the same. Type 2 supernovae, on the contrary, have an optical spectrum rich in hydrogen lines, the shapes of their light curves are very diverse, and the brightness at maximum varies greatly among different supernovae. To complete the picture of the differences between these types of supernovae, we point out that only type 1 supernovae flare up in elliptical galaxies (i.e., galaxies without a spiral structure with a reduced rate of star formation, the main composition of which are low-mass red stars), while in spiral In galaxies (including our Milky Way galaxy), both types of supernovae occur, and it has been established that type 2 supernovae are concentrated towards the spiral arms of galaxies, where there is an active process of star formation and many young massive stars.

These phenomenological features suggest the different nature of the two types of supernovae. It has now been reliably established that during the explosion of any supernova, approximately the same (giant!) amount of energy is always released, 10 53 erg, which corresponds to the binding energy of the resulting compact remnant (recall that the binding energy of a star corresponds to the amount of energy that needs to be expended in order to " "spray" the matter of a star over an infinitely distant distance). The main energy of the explosion is carried away not by photons, but by neutrinos - a relativistic particle with a very low mass or even massless (this issue has been actively studied over the last 10-20 years at the most powerful particle accelerators), since the high density of the stellar interior does not allow photons to freely leave the star, and neutrinos interact extremely weakly with matter (as they say, they have a very small interaction cross section) and for them the interior of the star is completely “transparent”.

A final self-consistent theory of a supernova explosion with the formation of a compact remnant and the ejection of the outer shell does not exist due to the extreme difficulty of taking into account all the physical processes occurring during a supernova explosion. However, all evidence suggests that type 2 supernovae are a consequence of the collapse of the star’s core, in which thermonuclear combustion occurred first of hydrogen into helium, then of helium into carbon, and so on until the formation of isotopes of the “iron peak” elements - iron, cobalt and nickel , the atomic nuclei of which have the maximum binding energy per particle (it is clear that the attachment of new particles to the nucleus, for example, iron, will require energy expenditure, and therefore thermonuclear combustion “stops” at the elements of the iron peak).

What causes the central parts of a massive star to lose stability and collapse as soon as the iron core becomes massive enough (about 1.5 solar masses)?
Currently, two main factors leading to collapse are known.
Firstly, this is the “breakup” of iron nuclei into 13 alpha particles (helium nuclei) with the release of photons (the so-called photodissociation of iron), and
Secondly, capture of electrons by protons with the formation of neutrons (so-called neutronization of matter).
Both processes become possible at high densities (over 1 ton per cubic cm), established in the center of stellar interiors at the end of evolution, and both of them effectively reduce the “elasticity” of matter, which actually resists the compressive action of gravitational forces. In this case, during the neutronization of matter, a large number of neutrinos are released, carrying away the main energy stored in the collapsing nucleus. Unlike the process of catastrophic core collapse, which has been developed in sufficient detail, the release of the stellar envelope (the explosion itself) is not so easy to achieve. Apparently, neutrinos play a significant role in this process.

As calculations carried out on supercomputers show, the density near the core is so high that even a neutrino weakly interacting with matter is “locked” for some time by the outer layers of the star. But gravitational forces attract the shell to the core and a situation arises similar to the one that occurs when trying to pour a denser liquid, for example, water, on top of a less dense one (for example, kerosene or oil) - it is well known from experience that a light liquid tends to “float” "from under the heavy one (this is where the so-called Rayleigh-Taylor instability manifests itself). This mechanism leads to the emergence of giant convective movements and, ultimately, the neutrino impulse is transferred to the overlying shell, which is dumped into the space surrounding the star. It is interesting to note that perhaps it is precisely these neutrino convective movements that lead to the violation of the spherical symmetry of the supernova explosion (in other words, a direction appears along which matter is predominantly ejected) - and then the resulting remnant receives a recoil impulse and begins to move in space by inertia at a speed of up to a thousand km /s (such high spatial velocities are observed in young neutron stars - radio pulsars). The described schematic picture of a type 2 supernova explosion allows us to explain the main observational features of this grandiose phenomenon. Moreover, the theoretical predictions of this model (especially regarding the total energy and spectrum of the neutrino burst) were in excellent agreement with the detected neutrino pulse that came on February 23, 1987 from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Now a few words about type 1 supernovae. The absence of hydrogen glow in their spectra suggests that the explosion occurred in a star devoid of a hydrogen envelope. It is now believed that this could be a Wolf-Rayet type star (in fact, these are the cores of stars rich in helium, carbon and oxygen, in which the pressure of light “blew away” the upper hydrogen shell, or, if such a massive star was part of a close binary system, this the shell “flowed” to a neighboring star under the influence of powerful tidal forces), in which the evolved core collapses (so-called type 1b supernovae), or exploding white dwarf.

How can a white dwarf explode? After all, this is a very dense star in which nuclear reactions do not take place, and the forces of gravity are resisted by the pressure of a dense gas consisting of electrons and ions, which is caused by the essentially quantum properties of electrons (the so-called degenerate electron gas). The reason here is the same as for the collapse of the cores of massive stars - a decrease in the elasticity of the star’s matter with an increase in its density. This is again due to the “pressing” of electrons into protons to form neutrons, as well as some relativistic effects that we will not consider here.

How can you increase the density of a white dwarf? This is impossible if it is single. But if a white dwarf is part of a sufficiently close binary system, then under the influence of gravitational forces gas from a neighboring star can flow to the white dwarf (remember the case of new stars!), and under certain conditions its mass (and therefore density) will gradually increase, which will ultimately lead to collapse and explosion. Another possible option is more exotic, but no less real - a collision of two white dwarfs. How is this possible, the attentive reader will ask, since the probability of two white dwarfs colliding in space is negligible, because the number of stars per unit volume is negligible (at most a few stars in 100-1000 parsecs). And here (for the umpteenth time!) the “culprit” turns out to be double stars, but now consisting of two white dwarfs. Without going into details of their formation and evolution, we will only note that, as follows from A. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, any two masses orbiting around each other must sooner or later collide due to a constant, albeit very insignificant, the removal of energy from such a system by waves of gravity - gravitational waves (for example, the Earth and the Sun, if the latter lived indefinitely, would collide due to this effect, albeit after a colossal time, much orders of magnitude greater than the age of the Universe).

It turns out that in the case of binary systems with stellar masses around the solar mass (2*10 30 kg), their “merger” should occur in a time less than the age of the Universe (approximately 10 billion years).
Estimates show that in a typical galaxy, such double white dwarfs can merge once every few hundred years. The gigantic energy released during this catastrophic process is quite sufficient to explain the phenomenon of a Type 1a Supernova. By the way, the approximate similarity of the masses of white dwarfs makes all such mergers “similar” to each other, so type 1a supernovae should look the same in their characteristics regardless of when and in which galaxy this event occurred. This property of type 1a supernovae is currently used by scientists to obtain an independent estimate of the most important cosmological parameter - the Hubble constant, which is a quantitative measure of the expansion rate of the Universe.

We talked only about the most ambitious stellar explosions that occur in the Universe and are observed in the optical range. We noted above that in the case of Supernovae, the main energy of the explosion is carried away by neutrinos, and not by light, therefore, studying the sky using neutrino astronomy methods has interesting prospects and will allow in the future to “look” into the very “inferno” of a supernova, hidden by huge thicknesses of matter opaque to light.
Even more amazing discoveries are promised by gravitational wave astronomy, which in the near future will tell us about the grandiose phenomena of the merger of double white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes.

In my answer, let me not concentrate on the mechanism of the explosion, which is very complex, varied and requires lengthy explanations, but will only concentrate on the original source of the explosion.

There are 2 main types of supernovae (in fact, everything is more complicated, but for now let's look at a simplified hierarchy).

U supernovasType II(they are also called core collapse) an explosion occurs when, due to a lack of central pressure, the star's core contracts under its own "gravity". After the catastrophic compression, several shock waves are formed, which spread outward and, in fact, what we call an explosion.

The reason for the start of such a catastrophic compression is that at some point the thermonuclear “fuel” in the center of the star runs out. When you burn up all the helium, carbon, etc., you eventually get to iron and nickel - the elements with the highest nuclear energy (per nucleon). After iron and nickel, you cannot produce anything in thermonuclear combustion, since everything quickly decays back.

If there is no combustion, then there is no internal pressure. However, there is gravity from the core itself, which was previously held in place by internal pressure. This imbalance, which is also sometimes called Chandrasekhar instability, and gives rise to collapse and explosion. It is worth noting that for such instability it is necessary that the core mass be ~1.4 solar masses, otherwise the collapse will stop at the white dwarf stage due to the additional pressure of degenerate electrons. To do this, it is necessary that the mass of the original star be > 8-10 solar.

As a result, after such an explosion, either a neutron star is formed, or, if the mass of the initial star was > 20 solar masses, a black hole.

The mechanism of core-collapse supernova explosions is still not fully understood, despite the fact that people have been studying this problem for more than half a century. But... In general, in the coming months, keep an eye out for publications on with the Princeton affiliation and the key surname "A. Burrows" ;)

Type I supernovae have a slightly different mechanism. They occur in binary systems, where one of the stars is a white dwarf and the other is an ordinary star, either a giant or another white dwarf. At some point, matter from the companion begins to flow to the white dwarf, accumulating on the surface.

As soon as the total mass of the dwarf becomes more than 1.4 solar masses, the same Chandrasekhar instability begins to develop, and further collapse of this white dwarf and, in fact, an explosion occurs.

The result is most likely the formation of a neutron star.

What kind of phenomenon is ball lightning, and why were they warned in childhood not to move if it flew into the room?

What do you know about supernovae? You will probably say that a supernova is a grandiose explosion of a star, in the place of which a neutron star or black hole remains.

However, not all supernovae are actually the final stage in the life of massive stars. The modern classification of supernova explosions, in addition to supergiant explosions, also includes some other phenomena.

Novas and supernovae

The term “supernova” migrated from the term “nova”. “Novae” were called stars that appeared in the sky almost from scratch, after which they gradually faded away. The first “new” ones are known from Chinese chronicles dating back to the second millennium BC. Interestingly, among these novae there were often supernovae. For example, it was a supernova in 1571 that was observed by Tycho Brahe, who subsequently coined the term “nova.” Now we know that in both cases we are not talking about the birth of new luminaries in the literal sense.

Novas and supernovae indicate a sharp increase in the brightness of a star or group of stars. As a rule, previously people did not have the opportunity to observe the stars that gave rise to these flares. These were objects too dim for the naked eye or astronomical instrument of that time. They were observed already at the moment of the flare, which naturally resembled the birth of a new star.

Despite the similarity of these phenomena, today there is a sharp difference in their definitions. The peak luminosity of supernovae is thousands and hundreds of thousands of times greater than the peak luminosity of novae. This discrepancy is explained by the fundamental difference in the nature of these phenomena.

The Birth of New Stars

The new flares are thermonuclear explosions occurring in some close star systems. Such systems also consist of a larger companion star (main sequence star, subgiant or). The white dwarf's powerful gravity pulls material from its companion star, causing an accretion disk to form around it. Thermonuclear processes occurring in the accretion disk at times lose stability and become explosive.

As a result of such an explosion, the brightness of the star system increases by thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of times. This is how a new star is born. A hitherto dim or even invisible object to an earthly observer acquires noticeable brightness. As a rule, such an outbreak reaches its peak in just a few days, and can fade away for years. Often such outbursts are repeated in the same system every few decades, i.e. are periodic. An expanding gas envelope is also observed around the new star.

Supernova explosions have a completely different and more diverse nature of their origin.

Supernovae are usually divided into two main classes (I and II). These classes can be called spectral, because they are distinguished by the presence and absence of hydrogen lines in their spectra. These classes are also noticeably different visually. All class I supernovae are similar both in explosion power and in the dynamics of brightness changes. Class II supernovae are very diverse in this regard. The power of their explosion and the dynamics of brightness changes lie in a very wide range.

All class II supernovae are generated by gravitational collapse in the interior of massive stars. In other words, this is the same explosion of supergiants that is familiar to us. Among the supernovae of the first class, there are those whose explosion mechanism is more similar to the explosion of new stars.

Death of the Supergiants

Stars whose mass exceeds 8-10 solar masses become supernovae. The cores of such stars, having exhausted hydrogen, proceed to thermonuclear reactions involving helium. Having exhausted helium, the nucleus proceeds to synthesize increasingly heavier elements. In the depths of the star, more and more layers are created, each of which has its own type of thermonuclear fusion. At the final stage of its evolution, such a star turns into a “layered” supergiant. The synthesis of iron occurs in its core, while closer to the surface the synthesis of helium from hydrogen continues.

The fusion of iron nuclei and heavier elements occurs with the absorption of energy. Therefore, having become iron, the supergiant core is no longer able to release energy to compensate for gravitational forces. The core loses its hydrodynamic equilibrium and begins to undergo random compression. The remaining layers of the star continue to maintain this equilibrium until the core contracts to a certain critical size. Now the remaining layers and the star as a whole are losing hydrodynamic equilibrium. Only in this case, it is not the compression that “wins,” but the energy released during the collapse and further chaotic reactions. The outer shell is released - a supernova explosion.

Class differences

The different classes and subclasses of supernovae are explained by what the star was like before the explosion. For example, the absence of hydrogen in class I supernovae (subclasses Ib, Ic) is a consequence of the fact that the star itself did not have hydrogen. Most likely, part of its outer shell was lost during evolution in a close binary system. The spectrum of subclass Ic differs from Ib in the absence of helium.

In any case, supernovae of such classes occur in stars that do not have an outer hydrogen-helium shell. The remaining layers lie within fairly strict limits of their size and mass. This is explained by the fact that thermonuclear reactions replace each other with the onset of a certain critical stage. This is why the explosions of class Ic and class Ib stars are so similar. Their peak luminosity is approximately 1.5 billion times that of the Sun. They reach this luminosity in 2-3 days. After this, their brightness weakens by 5-7 times per month and slowly decreases in subsequent months.

Type II supernova stars had a hydrogen-helium shell. Depending on the mass of the star and its other features, this shell may have different boundaries. This explains the wide range in supernova patterns. Their brightness can range from tens of millions to tens of billions of solar luminosities (excluding gamma-ray bursts - see below). And the dynamics of changes in brightness have a very different character.

White dwarf transformation

A special category of supernovae are flares. This is the only class of supernovae that can occur in elliptical galaxies. This feature suggests that these flares are not the product of the death of supergiants. Supergiants do not live to see their galaxies “grow old,” i.e. will become elliptical. Also, all flashes in this class have almost the same brightness. Thanks to this, type Ia supernovae are the “standard candles” of the Universe.

They arise according to a distinctively different pattern. As noted earlier, these explosions are somewhat similar in nature to new explosions. One scheme for their origin suggests that they also originate in a close system of a white dwarf and its companion star. However, unlike new stars, detonation of a different, more catastrophic type occurs here.

As it "devours" its companion, the white dwarf increases in mass until it reaches the Chandrasekhar limit. This limit, approximately equal to 1.38 solar masses, is the upper limit of the mass of a white dwarf, after which it turns into a neutron star. Such an event is accompanied by a thermonuclear explosion with a colossal release of energy, many orders of magnitude higher than a normal new explosion. The almost constant value of the Chandrasekhar limit explains such a small discrepancy in the brightness of various flares of this subclass. This brightness is almost 6 billion times higher than solar luminosity, and the dynamics of its change are the same as those of class Ib, Ic supernovae.

Hypernova explosions

Hypernovae are explosions whose energy is several orders of magnitude higher than the energy of typical supernovae. That is, in fact, they are hypernovae, very bright supernovae.

Typically, a hypernova is considered to be an explosion of supermassive stars, also called . The mass of such stars starts at 80 and often exceeds the theoretical limit of 150 solar masses. There are also versions that hypernovae can form during the annihilation of antimatter, the formation of a quark star, or the collision of two massive stars.

Hypernovae are remarkable in that they are the main cause of perhaps the most energy-intensive and rarest events in the Universe - gamma-ray bursts. The duration of gamma bursts ranges from hundredths of seconds to several hours. But most often they last 1-2 seconds. In these seconds, they emit energy similar to the energy of the Sun for all 10 billion years of its life! The nature of gamma-ray bursts is still largely unknown.

Progenitors of life

Despite all their catastrophic nature, supernovae can rightfully be called the progenitors of life in the Universe. The power of their explosion pushes the interstellar medium into the formation of gas and dust clouds and nebulae, in which stars are subsequently born. Another feature of them is that supernovae saturate the interstellar medium with heavy elements.

It is supernovae that give rise to all chemical elements that are heavier than iron. After all, as noted earlier, the synthesis of such elements requires energy. Only supernovae are capable of “charging” compound nuclei and neutrons for the energy-intensive production of new elements. The kinetic energy of the explosion carries them throughout space along with the elements formed in the depths of the exploding star. These include carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and other elements without which organic life is impossible.

Supernova Observation

Supernova explosions are extremely rare phenomena. Our galaxy, which contains more than a hundred billion stars, experiences only a few flares per century. According to chronicles and medieval astronomical sources, over the past two thousand years only six supernovae visible to the naked eye have been recorded. Modern astronomers have never observed supernovae in our galaxy. The closest one occurred in 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellites of the Milky Way. Every year, scientists observe up to 60 supernovae occurring in other galaxies.

It is because of this rarity that supernovae are almost always observed already at the moment of their outburst. Events preceding it have almost never been observed, so the nature of supernovae still remains largely mysterious. Modern science is not able to accurately predict supernovae. Any candidate star can flare up only after millions of years. The most interesting in this regard is Betelgeuse, which has a very real opportunity to illuminate the earth’s sky in our lifetime.

Universal flares

Hypernova explosions are even rarer. In our galaxy, such an event occurs once every hundreds of thousands of years. However, gamma-ray bursts generated by hypernovae are observed almost daily. They are so powerful that they are recorded from almost all corners of the Universe.

For example, one of the gamma-ray bursts, located 7.5 billion light years away, could be seen with the naked eye. It happened in the Andromeda galaxy, and for a couple of seconds the earth’s sky was illuminated by a star with the brightness of the full moon. If it happened on the other side of our galaxy, a second Sun would appear against the background of the Milky Way! It turns out that the brightness of the flare is quadrillion times brighter than the Sun and millions of times brighter than our Galaxy. Considering that there are billions of galaxies in the Universe, it is not surprising why such events are recorded every day.

Impact on our planet

It is unlikely that supernovae could pose a threat to modern humanity and in any way affect our planet. Even a Betelgeuse explosion would only light up our sky for a few months. However, they certainly influenced us decisively in the past. An example of this is the first of five mass extinctions on Earth, which occurred 440 million years ago. According to one version, the cause of this extinction was a gamma-ray burst that occurred in our Galaxy.

More noteworthy is the completely different role of supernovae. As already noted, it is supernovae that create the chemical elements necessary for the emergence of carbon-based life. The earth's biosphere was no exception. The solar system was formed in a gas cloud that contained fragments of past explosions. It turns out that we all owe our appearance to the supernova.

Moreover, supernovae continued to influence the evolution of life on Earth. By increasing the radiation background of the planet, they forced organisms to mutate. We should also not forget about major extinctions. Surely supernovae have “made adjustments” to the earth’s biosphere more than once. After all, if it weren’t for those global extinctions, completely different species would now dominate the Earth.

The scale of stellar explosions

To clearly understand how much energy supernova explosions have, let us turn to the equation of mass and energy equivalent. According to him, every gram of matter contains a colossal amount of energy. So 1 gram of the substance is equivalent to the explosion of an atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. The energy of the Tsar Bomb is equivalent to three kilograms of matter.

Every second during thermonuclear processes in the depths of the Sun, 764 million tons of hydrogen are converted into 760 million tons of helium. Those. Every second the Sun emits energy equivalent to 4 million tons of matter. Only one two-billionth of the total energy of the Sun reaches the Earth, this is equivalent to two kilograms of mass. Therefore, they say that the explosion of the Tsar Bomba could be observed from Mars. By the way, the Sun delivers to Earth several hundred times more energy than humanity consumes. That is, in order to cover the annual energy needs of all modern humanity, only a few tons of matter need to be converted into energy.

Considering the above, imagine that the average supernova at its peak “burns” quadrillions of tons of matter. This corresponds to the mass of a large asteroid. The total energy of a supernova is equivalent to the mass of a planet or even a low-mass star. Finally, a gamma-ray burst, in seconds, or even a fraction of a second of its life, splashes out energy equivalent to the mass of the Sun!

Such different supernovae

The term "supernova" should not be associated solely with the explosion of stars. These phenomena are perhaps as diverse as the stars themselves are diverse. Science has yet to understand many of their secrets.