dirtymatt

Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about, but what part of the big bang says that supernovas have to stop "just before the light rays could reach us"? I'm not even certain what this means. Does light have an expiration date on it or something? Does the light from an event that happened 100,000 years ago suddenly disapear? I know eventually enough of the light would hit enough interstellar gas that it would no longer be visable, but still, this statement seems a bit far fetched. Also, haven't we witnessed supernovas happenning? I seem to recall hearing something about one that was just observable from earth not too long ago.

With regards to #16. Let's play a little math game. First we'll assume that by "a few" the author means 2 in the past 1000 years (which would seem to contradict the previous statement, but I will ignore that). Now let us assume that the universe is 10,000,000,000 (10 billion) years old, which as I understand it, is a conservative estimate. Ok, so now we have 2 supernovas per 1000 years, or 2supernovas/1000years. Now we take our 2supernovas/1000years and multiply it by 10,000,000,000years, and we get 20,000,000supernovas. That seems like a pretty big number to me.

Again, I know very little about all of this, but these are just some thoughts that occured to me as being common sense. Please someone stand up and tell me I'm completely wrong. The arguments presented don't even seem to hold up to each other, let alone to actual science.

Dan<Devil>

There is no doubt that the scientific value of theese 42 arguments is below 0.... However the number of ignorants that will consider this page correct is too big....

In novas and supernovas complex organic compounds have been detected(aromatic hidrocarbures for example). It is also a good fact to know that the mass of carbon is 12...

Mageth

Only a few super-novas have occurred in the past thousand years

Here's a list of historical Milky Way supernovae.

And that's just for the Milky Way. And we may have missed some.

Also, haven't we witnessed supernovas happenning? I seem to recall hearing something about one that was just observable from earth not too long ago.

The research I posted a link to above (about the expansion of the universe) involves surveying supernovae in other galaxies. IIRC, they were examining several extragalactic supernovae a night to select a few good candidates for their research.

There have been more than 2300 extragalactic supernovae catalogued since 1885. I suspect we have just begun to scratch the surface.

That seems like a pretty big number to me.

And, if correct, that's just in our galaxy.

Answerer

Yeah, same here. Could someone kindly explain?

Friar Bellows

All the time. Last year about 300 supernovae were observed in other galaxies. The last supernova to go off in our galaxy (at least, to have been observed by us) was SN1604, Kepler's supernova, which reached about the same apparent brightness as Jupiter (i.e. a few times brighter than the brightest star in the sky). Of course, its absolute brightness was phenomenal, probably a significant fraction of the entire Milky Way galaxy itself. But only for a small amount of time.

You're probably thinking about SN1987A. This was a naked-eye supernova which occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby irregular dwarf galaxy which orbits our own galaxy. I remember it as a faintish red-orange point of light, and through my telescope you could view it in the same field-of-view as the Tarantula Nebula, a giant region of ionised hydrogen. SN1987A occurred about 170,000 light years away from us.