The Brightest Night Sky Ever
The main thing that differs between day and night is the presence of light. What If the night sky is lit up more than it usually is. The Night sky with blistering lightness out of nowhere. The night all have been waiting for is possible by Supernova.
Let’s start with what Supernova is, This phenomenon occurs when a star dies. We can consider Star as a ticking time bomb. When a star is about to die, it shrinks and shrinks losing all its fuel (which is Hydrogen) converting to helium, which in turn converts into other elements like neon, silicon, Iron, etc by Nuclear Fusion. Nuclear Fusion is the process in which Hydrogen combines to form Helium in this context. Generally, Lighter atoms combine to form heavier atoms by releasing a huge amount of energy. You remember Little Boy from the second world war, which totaled Hiroshima and its native for decades. In an atomic bomb, nuclear fission occurs, splitting heavier atoms into lighter atoms. Unlike Fission, We were not able to completely control Fission. You might have heard about the artificial sun, which involves Nuclear fusion. You can read more about it here.
As the star shrinks its mass increases. This increases to such an extent that it cant withstand its gravitational force, so the core collapses and the star explodes releasing a huge amount of energy. Supernovas are the biggest explosions in the universe that we have discovered. It's also one of the best light shows that any human can ever boast about. To understand its intensity, if our beloved sun ends up in supernova, Earth will meltdown and there won’t be any trace of such a thing. Our SUN is not the largest either so you can imagine the result when stars the of size 10,000 times of our sun.
Luckily Sun will last for another 5 billion years so there is hope. But there are some other stars which are about to die. One such is the Betelguese. It's the second brightest star in the Orion constellation. Betelguese is gigantic compared to our sun. If we replace our sun with Betelgeuse, it would require space up to Jupiter. The star has been following a bright and dim pattern until in December 2019, scientists discovered some abnormality in it as it got more dimmer. It gave immense hope to stargazers and scientists that we will be witnessing a supernova with naked eyes in decades but in 2020 everything came to normal. Scientists concluded that it was some cloud of dust covering the sight from the earth. That hope ended.
We might be able to witness a Red nova. There is a binary star system(having 2 stars revolving around each other)KIC 9832227 which is a potential candidate. The two stars are coming closer to each other and it was calculated that it would merge in 2022 upon which an immense amount of energy will be released. The data on which this conclusion was made is from 1999,2003 and 2007. Unfortunately, the data of 1999 had a miscalculation of about 12 hours. So, the merge will not occur in 2022 but there is a small ray of hope.
Now let's assume this happened, the effects on earth won't be disastrous, well as per current knowledge. The shockwaves and gamma rays emitted by these will reach us with very little energy due to the long journey. If this energy is higher than expected then it's possible to deteriorate our atmosphere endangering all sorts of life forms.
The stars that we are discussing here are thousands of light-years away, so even if anything happens today it will take much longer to reach us. These phenomena occur frequently yet scientists are not able to explain them all. The findings made by Hubble and Kepler Telescope are enormous that we cant apprehend all those with current theories. This continues to be our story, in hope that we could see something spectacular in near future.
