There’s a what if for that!
Turns out you can get knocked over by a feather!
Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale:
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.
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).
Even if the other forms of energy and matter from the supernova explosion were removed, the ultradense burst of neutrinos alone would literally vaporize someone from the inside in close proximity. While neutrinos are most often harmless, this is one of the few times they can be lethal. In a core-collapse supernova, roughly 99% of the energy is released as a burst of neutrinos, totaling about 10^53 ergs over 10 seconds. So the neutrino flux from the supernova would be so insane that enough neutrinos would collide with the atoms in your body to deposit lethal amounts of energy. This ultimately leads to one being vaporized from the inside!
This is countered by the fact that neutrinos almost never interact with normal matter.
Based on the xkcd discussion posted, you would get a 4 severts dose (lethal radiation) at around 2.3AU. About the orbit of Mars. This is radiation damage however. You likely wouldn’t feel it directly, let alone be vaporised. This is also already inside the star going supernova.
To vaporise meat takes about 1500000j/kg. This would equate to 1,500,000 severts. Assuming a point emitter, this would be with 0.004AU, or about 500,000km away. This is likely well within the core of the star, so the maths likely breaks down before this point.
This is countered by the fact that neutrinos almost never interact with normal matter.
Follow-up question, then:
When they do in this extreme supernova scenario, are they frying their meat via direct impact (whatever that means at those scales) with the nucleus, or via the Weak Force?Because none of that energy is going to be transferred electromagnetically, a very strange thing to think about.
Neutrinos can interact with my quarks (and so the nucleus) and electrons. The energy transferred however is very small. Supernova neutrinos are at around 10-12MeV. A photon with the same energy would be around 0.1mm wavelength, or 2.9Ghz. For comparison, you need a wavelength of around 120nm (2500Thz) to crack DNA. This is in the UV band.
In short, neutrinos would damage via thermal effects. There would be effectively no shielding by other tissue, leading to near perfectly even heating. Your spaceship will also be kicked by the force. However, it would be evenly spread over every atom present. You wouldn’t experience any g forces, just the feeling of being cooked alive, perfectly evenly. An external observer would see you get pushed back.
I’m now wondering on the kitchen utility of a neutrino microwave. It would deliver perfectly even cooking, unlike an oven, or microwave oven… The safety shielding and power requirements would likely be non-viable, however.
One step at a time there, cowboy!
At first a neutrino oven would be prohibitively expensive for a regular household, we’d be seeing the first commercial model installed by some restaurant in Las Vegas, that’s quite a gimmick: Neutrino-Zapped Food!
Then in the lounge by the casino, stand-up comics would be making jokes about steaks coming in three flavors: electron, muon and tau.
Then for some reason, I’m seeing all this in black-n-white.
I suspect that would be too close. You need a light year of lead to stop 50% of neutrinos. That makes distance the only real shielding. I’d guess 10AU should be enough to push the dose down to reasonable levels. About the distance from the sun to Saturn. If we put the oven in Saturn orbit, that could work. We would need to evacuate that side of the solar system, but that’s not too hard.
The real challenge is getting your steak to the table in a timely manner. A relativistic missile could work. Unfortunately the exhaust of earth approach would be a hassle to deal with. The G forces also won’t likely do your dinner any good.
Not so neutral then
