Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:
A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or
The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?
Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is … by nine orders of magnitude.
Well… I wasn’t expecting to read something like this today. Nor indeed, tomorrow and yesterday!
EDIT:
Then there’s this, pointing out unbelievable stuff along the way, effortlessly. You gotta love Randall Munro.
Core collapse supernovae happen to giant stars, so if you observed a supernova from that distance, you’d probably be inside the outer layers of the star that created it.
I ran the numbers extending this. It would be 500,000km, or 0.004AU to vaporise meat. This is well inside the star, possibly within the core itself (making the maths even less reliable).
There’s a what if for that!
https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
Turns out you can get knocked over by a feather!
Well… I wasn’t expecting to read something like this today. Nor indeed, tomorrow and yesterday!
EDIT:
Then there’s this, pointing out unbelievable stuff along the way, effortlessly. You gotta love Randall Munro.
Sounds like the answer is probably no, but you could get a lethal dose of radiation
I ran the numbers extending this. It would be 500,000km, or 0.004AU to vaporise meat. This is well inside the star, possibly within the core itself (making the maths even less reliable).