How many supernova explode every year?
178 comments
·April 12, 2025rookderby
criddell
I bought Outer Wilds based on recommendations like yours and I found it kind of boring. The world is mostly empty and the repetitiveness wore me down. I didn't finish it.
It's a great looking game though and the first hour or two I had a blast.
packetlost
Same here. I found the controls to be frustrating and the game-play loop to be kinda dull. The story on the other hand, is very good. I get that the game-play is meant to illicit certain feelings, but it just didn't do it for me. I did enjoy reading a synopsis of the story on the wiki though.
shhsshs
Question for you and commenter above, do you play games with controls similar to Outer Wilds often? Do you play many games in general? I've seen this comment a few times and I'm curious why this is such a common talking point. I thought the controls were very intuitive, so I'm curious if it's a familiarity issue or something else.
rbanffy
> The story on the other hand, is very good.
There seems to be lots of games that should have been movies or series instead.
astroalex
This is tragic. It's one of favorite games of all time--heck, one of my favorite media experiences, period. It's worth pushing through until you get hooked.
glimshe
I rage quit Outer Wilds. So repetitive, I couldn't take it despite the novel premise. The controls suck and I'm an experienced player.
danso
LOL just started replaying OW for the first time in years, and my immediate reaction to seeing this headline was to go to the comments and make an OW reference
tialaramex
That's one of my favourite hints in Outer Wilds. You will see a Supernova. Not with a fancy telescope, it's visible to the naked eye, and if you watch the sky you'll see another soon enough. You can see this right at the start, and unlike the random direction of the probe launch you don't need any game lore to, if you're smart enough, put two and two together.
marklar423
It's funny, I noticed I happening and thought it was proof of the opposite - that there had to be some artificial cause for the supernovae (including the Sun), because a real supernova takes many years to progress, not 20 minutes.
Even after visiting the Sun Station I didn't believe it and thought it was a narrative red herring....so the ending was a surprise to me. Somehow.
SwtCyber
Honestly one of those rare games that makes you feel like a real explorer, not just someone following a path the devs laid out.
danso
Truly one of the most purest of video games in terms of player freedom, I’m still sad that I didn’t think to record my own playthrough as everyone’s path of discovery is more or less unique.
The freeform gameplay and incredible ending makes OW easily my pick for best game of all time, even though it’s also my least replayed favorite game.
me_me_me
I hope that game will be treated like LothR or Shakespeare, it is truly special experience.
RicoElectrico
[flagged]
aceazzameen
I recommend deleting this post.
tialaramex
I mean, yes it will, but mostly no that's not what the hint is about. Play the game.
delusional
HUGE SPOILER ALERT. SERIOUSLY, PLAY OUTER WILDS.
It's a little more than just " the sun will also go supernova". The core conceit of the games story is that you're living in the final moments of dying universe.
aqme28
The fact that there is a supernova isn't much of a spoiler. It's more like the premise of the game. It's difficult to not discover this within the first 30 minutes.
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sebastiennight
I love how you respond to a huge spoiler comment with another huge spoiler!
At this point I will never play this game, I guess
IggleSniggle
Oh. Whoops. I thought you were saying the other comment was a huge spoiler, not that YOURS was, and I was like "eh, it's not THAT big of a spoiler." Ah, well. With that mystery abolished, time to return to the likes of Mario!
sounds of brain returning to monke
rwky
This reminds me of a few years ago when I was doing my MSc our group was learning how to work one of the remote telescopes and we were asked to point it at the brightest object found by Gaia that week and it turned out to be a supernova. Very cool for your first observation using a remote telescope! If anyone wants to see it here it is https://ibb.co/Kzqbfq30
And here is the Gaia data http://gsaweb.ast.cam.ac.uk/alerts/alert/Gaia23bqb/
kakuri
I really feel like this article should also mention the rate of formation of new stars. According to [1] Universe Magazine the James Webb telescope has revealed that more than 3,000 stars are formed every second.
[1] https://universemagazine.com/en/james-webb-comes-closer-to-r...
citizenpaul
Based on this about 5.5 million stars are created every 30 minutes and only about 1 start goes supernova in the same period? This seems like it really reinforces the we are still in the early stages of the universe theory if the ratios are that imbalanced.
Still though the imbalance in those events makes me suspicious that we are missing something.
BobAliceInATree
The vast majority of stars don't supernova.
Also, we're at the tail end of star-forming era. about 95% of all the stars that will be formed, have already been formed.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-s...
Taek
I don't understand this comment. Like yes, 3000 stars per second, cool fact. But why would that fact make sense in the article? The article was about being surprised by the name "SN 2021 afdx", which has nothing to do with star formation.
In my opinion the article was great and is also complete. More cool astronomy facts belong in some other article or format.
dgs_sgd
Because the amount of stars that can go supernova is limited by how many stars there are in the first place? A comment about the staggering rate of star formation makes sense to me in relation to an article about the staggering rate of star supernovas..
jxf
I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.
sexy_seedbox
Now let us all stop thinking about the incomprehensible and go back to providing value to our shareholders.
BitwiseFool
It would be a tragic shame for life to inhabit such a vast universe only for faster than light travel to be impossible.
daxfohl
Or how small we are
ben_w
Hmm…
So that's cool, but now I'm thinking: the distant galaxies are redshifted and time-dilated in equal proportion, and also more densly packed because the universe was smaller in the past, so I expect the actual rate of supernovas to be significantly smaller than simply multiplying 1/century/galaxy by 1e11 galaxies.
Edit: also I don't know if rate of supernovas changes over history thanks to different steller environments giving the population-1/2/3 generations of stars…
wolfram74
I would imagine the supernova rate to be higher in the early universe, as we've already passed peak stellar formation rates and the heavier (and shorter lived) stars were more likely to be formed earlier when the average density of the universe was higher.
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ls612
It probably isn't wildly lower today, we know of at least five or six big supernovae in the Milky Way in the past millennium. For 200B stars in our galaxy the size normalized rate implied by that would be like one ever 300 years. So if you extrapolated the Milky Way alone in (cosmological) modernity you would get 10/sec not 30/sec.
btilly
There is dust between us and most stars in the Milky Way that blocks them from view in visible light. Therefore we can only see a fraction of the supernovae in the Milky Way.
It is substantially easier for us to see supernovae in other galaxies that we're not facing edge-on. And we have a large sample size of such galaxies. That's why our best estimates of supernovae frequency are based on observations of such galaxies, and not on our observations of the Milky Way.
dr_dshiv
The most stars a person can see with the naked eye? About 8000.
And, less than half that, actually — since we can’t see the other side of the hemisphere
herendin2
If I got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year. That's scary. But I think I'm getting the math very wrong.
edit: I guess my error might be related to confusing a probability factor with the number of incidents in a period.
edit: The right answer is probably up to 1 in every 10bn stars go supernovae in the universe each year (or 1 in 10bn die and a fraction are supernovae). Thanks: yzydserd and zild3d
yzydserd
A star "lasts" about 10 billion years, so you'd expect about 1 in 10 billion stars to 'die' each year, but only a tiny proportion (the very largest) go supernova.
Numbers are huge. Even tiny ratios mean something like 10-100 stars go supernova every single second somewhere in the universe.
Sounds a lot? Only about 1 star per galaxy goes supernova per century. A lot of galaxies.
Mindblowing.
arp242
The lifespan of stars varies a lot by type and size, with largest stars having a very short life-span of maybe a few dozen million of years and small ones up to dozens of billions of years. I'm not sure what the average is.
Tuna-Fish
> A star "lasts" about 10 billion years, so you'd expect about 1 in 10 billion stars to 'die' each year, but only a tiny proportion (the very largest) go supernova.
This analysis really doesn't work. Star lifespan is inversely correlated to size. A star large enough to just barely go supernova is only going to live for ~100M years, and as they get bigger, the lifespans fall rapidly.
(Why? Because gravity is what provides the pressure for fusion to happen, and so more gravity means fusion happens faster. For large stars, the luminosity is something like the mass to the 3.5th power. Also, convection works less well for larger stars, so as stars grow bigger, ever smaller proportion of the star takes any part in the fusion reactions in the core.)
icehawk
So only 0.12% of all main sequence stars, have the mass that can become the most common type of supernova, and they apparently only last for about 100 million years.
jibe
Wouldn’t the creation dates of stars be clustered around certain points in time. So the supernovas should also happen in groups?
throwawaymaths
what's the rate of Type Ia supernovas? Higher I would guess? (n>=2-aries are common and medium mass main sequence stars are common, though it takes them a while to get to white dwarf)
zild3d
He mentioned a rough estimate of one per century per galaxy. Estimate for average stars per galaxy is 100 million, which would be 1 in 10 billion stars every year
Someone
> If got the math right, then about 1 in every 32,000 stars in the universe goes supernova each year
Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.
It also would mean stars, on average, do not get very old. Over 10% of the stars that the ancient Greeks saw in the sky would have to have gone supernova since then.
crag-jene
Not all stars can go supernova. Sol will never go supernova. Only very massive stars can—or stars that become very massive by absorbing other stars.
btilly
Binary white dwarf systems can also go supernova, even if the combined mass is not that large as far as stars go.
herendin2
> Can’t be right, can it? It would make the Sun (over 4 billion years old) an enormous outlier.
Yes. That fact that I'm thinking made me think I was certainly wrong
dostick
Isn’t the answer infinity? We don’t know what’s beyond observed part of universe, and there’s infinity number of universes. If our emerged then there’s others.
tialaramex
There is no reason to expect any particular number of universes. We've observed exactly one, this one, which had to exist or else we wouldn't be here to observe that it existed.
Our universe is finite, so although it is unbounded (lacks edges) there aren't an infinite number of anything in it, galaxies, stars, M&Ms, grains of sand, atoms of hydrogen all finite.
atq2119
Has that really been established? The observable universe is finite, yes, but I wouldn't think that automatically implied that the universe as a whole is.
andyjohnson0
> and there’s infinity number of universes
There is no evidence that there are a infinite number of universes. All we know of is the one we exist in. The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that there are a very large number of non-interacting "worlds" which may or may not be the same as "universes".
And if you meant "infinity number of galaxies" then that would require an infinite-size universe, and we don't know if that is the case for our universe. It could be, or it could be finite but unbounded.
dostick
Yes we don’t know if other universes exist. So it’s 50/50 infinity or one. Then if our universe came into existence, then probability is not 50/50, because we know that something exists, therefore something else is more likely to exist, probability towards infinity.
If you were observer of emptiness and no universe or anything existing then you would say it’s more likely there will be nothing, so probability towards zero.
Not to forget the recursion. There’s likely universes within our elementary particles or our universe is a particle in parent one.
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thih9
> [Supernova discovery statistics for 2021] says there were 21,081 supernovae seen in 2021
> When the Vera Rubin survey telescope goes online, it’s expected to see hundreds of thousands of supernovae per year by itself.
whoisthemachine
Maybe they will have to transition from Base 26 counting to Base 64!
IggleSniggle
It's in the article. SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa vs SN2067aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Apparently astronomers find base26 very straightforward and reasonable!
IggleSniggle
Also, as a cousin comment alludes to, for there to be one of the above supernovae, there will also be a supernova named SN2067iamsoverystupidoopssorry and a SN2067thisnamingschemawasabadidea
Wobbles42
That is unfortunate. With only two prime factors, one of which being 13, base 26 is even worse than base 10, and it doesn't even have anatomical coincidence to recommend it. Much better to use base 36 -- we have a ready made character set for it by simply adding the digits to the 26 alphabetic characters. This gives us many more integer prime factors. Not as good as base 60, but better than base 26 and finger numbers.
Voultapher
As per the post:
> That’s one hundred billion supernovae per century, or a billion per year, or about 30 per second.
7 characters of base26 gives you 8 billion combinations. "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" requires ~1e48 events when going by the actual non base26 scheme. So I wouldn't be worried.
drbig
The universe is vast and full of nothing...
Which in case of explodey stars is a very good thing indeed!
layer8
It’s full of radiation everywhere, regardless in which direction we look and how highly we resolve it.
subscribed
It's fun to think that at some point it will be actually vast and completely dark
huxley
One of the best infinitive canvas webcomics ever was done on that topic by Drew Weing: https://www.drewweing.com/puppages/13pup.html
rbanffy
We have a couple trillion years to figure out a way to fix that.
Wobbles42
Or to acquire the wisdom to accept it. We certainly are far too young to have a perspective to say which course of action is better -- or indeed to define what "better" means.
loloquwowndueo
We don’t need to fix that, do we? Just let it be. You’ll be long dead anyway.
frainfreeze
Does it need fixing?
jvm___
https://youtu.be/uD4izuDMUQA?si=LcVxE3w-ohGqZAr7
If you need some existential dread. It's a hypothetical video to portray the rest of the universe, the time speed moving forward doubles every 5 seconds - and it's 29 minutes long...
Obscurity4340
Really incredible video, thanks a quadrillion
selectnull
Astronomers will find out that naming is hard once they need to name 119741st supernova.
pelagicAustral
I think it will be far before that, once they start hitting supernovae name jackpots like SN2026 cu*t et al.
selectnull
I know :) This one was just the first to came to mind.
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darthrupert
The whole things seems like such a massive living system that I cannot help guessing that what we think of as universe is just a somewhat large single creature.
Cyphase
This reminds me of this quote from Jill Tarter of SETI, specifically the last sentence:
“Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans? Whether we’re born in San Francisco or Sudan or close to the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust. We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
source: https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_tarter_join_the_seti_search (@ 3:02)
yieldcrv
I think this is not too difficult for humans to comprehend, it just doesn't address the resource appropriation and geographic property claims on this planet. Aside from generational interest, conflict areas tend to have something obviously appealing about them, so there's nothing that a bigger picture nihilism helps with.
aoeusnth1
Well, if physicalism is true then consciousness is a phenomenon of quantum fields, which span the universe. So yes, stretching the definition of creature, this could be interpreted as literally true.
SwtCyber
There's something kinda poetic (and maybe even logical) about the idea that what we perceive as scattered galaxies and physics is actually just the internal processes of something far bigger than we can comprehend.
jxf
Poetic, or maybe Lovecraftian. A lot of "cosmic horror" has the trope of vastnesses too big to comprehend, where even trying to think about it (or in some cases merely learning of the possibility) causes you to go mad.
ravetcofx
Some might call that God. Or at least some form of Pantheism
ndsipa_pomu
It's an appealing idea, but surely there'd be insurmountable problems with the distance/time involved for any part to communicate to another part? It'd be like trying to run a computer with a clock that takes millions (billions?) of years to make a single tick. I just don't see that it's at all feasible and that's without even trying to guess as to how different parts can change behaviour depending on its environment (one commonly used requirement of "life").
dkersten
What’s wrong with it taking a billion of our years to tick? Just because we, smaller than microscopic beings compared to the size of the larger structures we observe, find it to be a vastly long time, doesn’t mean that it’s a long time for something the size of the observable universe.
For a single bacteria cell, our timeframes must seem immense too.
I’m not saying it’s particularly likely, but it’s a trap to think that just because you can’t fathom the scales that makes it impossible. The universe is huge and very very old. It can afford to wait what is a long time to us for something to happen.
I do think you’re likely right in practice though, and that it is too long for the universe to be an organism. But who knows. We already know that mathematically speaking the heat death of the universe looks identical to a very zoomed in big bang, maybe we just need to zoom out a few billion orders of magnitude to see the big picture, where the vast distances and time scales we see appear as little more than micrometers and microseconds apart…
ndsipa_pomu
The problem with zooming out is that the speed of light sets a specific size/time scale so the more zoomed out you get, the more disconnected the big picture is. The observable universe is a mere 93 billion light-years across, so there's a limit on how far it makes sense to talk about zooming out. Also, with the universe expanding, the observable size will reduce over a long time period.
The scales involved are vastly different than the minor difference in scales between bacteria and us - we don't have to worry about the speed of light for anything that we currently consider alive.
tialaramex
> a clock that takes millions (billions?) of years to make a single tick
Much worse than that, the universe is enormous and it is expanding faster than the maximum possible velocity, as a result such a clock could never complete a single tick.
First off, dont look at the outer wilds discussion on here, just play the game. Second - they didnt say how many letters we need to encode all of the observable supernova in a given year! So 100 billion galaxies, 1 per year per galaxy, we have around 1 billion to encode. Sorry two edits this moring, first one was right. due to math without coffee. 1e9/26^6 is about 3, 1e9/26^7 is less than one. So we might see 'SN2050aaaaaah'!