Lead
We know that as the brightest celestial body, the brightness of the Sun is well known, and even so, the Sun we see during the day is extremely dazzling, even though the Sun is surrounded by a thick atmosphere.
The brightness of the sun will dim at night, and the brightest at night is the full moon, and the brightness of the full moon is also quite high, so we can see these two brightness celestial bodies in our daily life.
If a supernova erupts somewhere near the Sun one day, is it possible that the brightness of this supernova will rival that of the Sun, or even exceed the brightness of the Full Moon?
How much influence will supernovae have on our solar system?
1. Supernova explosions.
A supernova explosion is a concentrated release of energy from a massive star in its later years, and astronomers have not discovered in years that such massive stars become Earth-like or Sun-like objects when they run out of fuel.
Instead, these increasingly heavy stars will turn into a special substance, and eventually explode violently, deplete, release tremendous energy, and then form a very dense, extremely strong, and extremely fast material outside of these debris, forming a magnetosphere similar to the Earth's magnetosphere.
In general, over time, the hydrogen-burning nuclear reactions inside the star will continue to produce helium, resulting in an increasingly difficult nuclear fusion reaction process.
When the inside of a star is not warm enough for helium to fuse, the star collapses and releases a tremendous amount of energy, known as a supernova explosion.
We all know that the sun is the most important source of light on Earth, it can support the photosynthesis of organisms in the entire biosphere, and can also provide heat for animals and plants to survive.
In addition, the sun can also transmit energy through light, so that human beings on the earth can read books, read newspapers, surf the Internet and other activities using light sources, the importance of the sun is self-evident.
However, if the sun explodes into a solar supernova, then human civilization will suffer a huge blow in terms of energy, because although a small number of human beings are qualified to survive through space stations other than Earth, the vast majority of human beings live on Earth.
The vegetation on the earth will surely die immediately, the plants and animals on the earth will freeze to death, and no life will survive on the hot surface of the sun, and the whole earth will return to a lifeless death.
The energy released by a supernova explosion is about the energy of dozens of suns, which is completely unbearable for human civilization on Earth, but it is just a very large energy in the universe, and the entire galaxy will be affected by the energy wave of this explosion, not just a few planets and stars.
In many galaxies, supernovae can erupt tens of thousands of times, which means that supernova explosions throughout the galaxy can release millions to tens of millions of times more energy than the sun, trapping entire galaxies in these high-temperature plasma materials.
2. The impact of supernovae on the Earth.
So, back in real life, do supernovae have any effect on the Earth?
After all, our solar system is not in a dangerous region of supernovae dormant, but in a mild growing star region of the Milky Way, so even if there is a supernova explosion, it will not affect life on Earth.
Still, astronomers have determined that Earth has been affected by supernova explosions, at least once, about 2.5 million years ago, when our solar system was located in a local bubble about 1,000 light-years in diameter.
This local bubble is a huge cavity that is much cooler and denser than the surrounding stellar nebulae, so no new stars have formed.
After the supernova next to this local bubble exploded, a huge and unstable gas bubble was born out of nothingness, because the temperature of this gas bubble is colder than the surrounding star clouds, so it can emit cold light, usually we can see in the starry sky at night with a telescope This cold light is called BYF2 molecule, this molecule usually only exists in the gas that can be cooled and emit spontaneously.
The BYF2 molecule in the local bubble is emitted by the surrounding night starlight, so 2.5 million years ago, the faint blue-white cold light in the sky was produced by this supernova explosion.
On the other hand, the energy generated by this supernova explosion is also extremely huge, and it has finally reached the Earth in the solar system after hundreds of thousands of years of propagation, and this energy will have an impact on life on Earth.
If there is a supernova explosion within 24 light-years, all life on that Earth will be bombarded by high energy and die, even the smallest bacteria and spores will die.
Even within a range of about 100 light-years, the Earth will be bombarded with radiation, and the ozone layer in the Earth's atmosphere will be completely destroyed by high-energy particles, and most of the Earth's organisms will not be able to withstand this high-energy radiation, and their DNA structures will be torn apart.
In addition, the energy released by supernova explosions produces ozone in the Earth's atmosphere, a gas that, although harmful, can block some ultraviolet light for a very small number of oxygen atoms, which means that life on Earth has a good chance of surviving before receiving these messages.
If astronomers strictly follow the estimates, the impact of supernova explosions and the problem of biological death must occur on the scale of tens of thousands of years, so in the past two million years, we can see the weak impact of supernova explosions on the earth.
But as we mentioned in the introduction, supernova explosions are not completely without effects, they are just as capable of transmitting energy as the sun, and this supernova operation even starts life in entire galaxies.
Between 23 and 2.5 billion years ago, there were already lower organisms on the earth, and they fell into misery and despair, because there was almost no oxygen in the atmosphere on the earth at that time, and there was no protection from the greenhouse effect, so the temperature would plummet to minus 150 degrees Celsius under the force of the sun on the asteroid, causing the water vapor to condense into ice on the surface, and the water remaining in the atmosphere would freeze on the ice and the surface.
This stage is called the "Snowball Earth" or "Greenhouse Earth" stage, but in this stage the survival of organisms is impossible, so many organisms are forced to go into a dormant state and wait for the Earth to return to its original state.
But 25 million years ago, a supernova appeared near the Earth about 20 light-years away from the Earth, and this supernova released a huge amount of energy when it exploded, and these energies were absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere into greenhouse gases, thus preventing the Earth's surface temperature from dropping to Europa, and where Europa was illuminated by the sun, the ice began to melt, and the water vapor in the atmosphere and the water in the oceans of nearby planets were sublimated into space, and in the atmosphere, the water vapor was irradiated by sunlight to produce hydrogen and oxygen molecules, After millions of years of action, eventually there is a large amount of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere, which greatly increases the possibility of new photosynthesis by organisms, and also provides new possibilities for the evolution of life forms.
3. The biological seeding mechanism of supernova explosions.
This phenomenon also allows us to see the impact of supernova explosions on life on Earth, and the energy released from supernova explosions irradiates to Earth, which may produce a variety of biological evolution possibilities, which means that supernova explosions may become a mechanism for the origin of organisms in the universe.
Generally speaking, the space in the universe is distributed with very sparse stars and extremely thin interstellar matter, so no new stars will be produced in space, but after some stars collide, great energy will be released, which is often called a space "disaster" by astronomers.
It takes up to hundreds of sun-bright stars to burst into a supernova, making supernovae the brightest stars in the universe, even at great distances from Earth, which can be observed with optical telescopes for human use.
If we look at the star where the supernova explosion occurred continuously, we can find that before the supernova explosion, very few elements formed on the star, only hydrogen accounts for about 75% of the total mass of the star.
But when the star explodes, its appearance material is dispersed throughout the universe, so the proportions of the elements in the universe are almost the same as those in the solar system.
However, astronomers have found that these newly formed planets and stars are very rich in elements, and the content of radioactive elements in them is significantly richer than that of the original stars, which makes these newly formed planets and stars more likely to form the origin material of life on their surfaces, and even form some simple life when the stars are active.
Therefore, astronomers speculate that these newly formed planets and stars must also inherit the legacy of the original supernovae, and it was these newly formed planets and stars that became the starting point of life and the foothold for more evolution of life.
In other words, a supernova explosion is like a biological seeding machine, by sowing heavy elements inside the star into the universe, and eventually making these heavy elements become part of the living organism, which means that without the supernova explosion, there will be no stellar evolution, and there will be no biological evolution.
epilogue
While the final outcome of a supernova could be devastating, it provides a necessary step for the evolution of life in the universe, like a very complex ecosystem.
In the past 100 years, human beings have gradually moved from the earth to the universe, and we have also begun to look for new supernova explosions in the Milky Way galaxy to explore the impact of supernovae on our solar system, which also provides us with clues to explore the origin of the solar system.
Therefore, we must cherish this solar system that once incubated us, and we must also cherish the life that hatched in the solar system, and we must also cherish the existence of life on the earth.