Supernova
The explosion of a Star or some other stellar objects.
Description (Specifications)
Inhabited worlds have not had any Supernova explosions in recorded history. This is not to say they are not going to happen: Heavier stars (those more than 8 times the mass of the sun) tend to end their lives this way - although some transition quietly directly to Black Holes.
Supernovae can be over 550,000,000,000 times as luminous as Sol - most are much less bright than this but they are still brighter than the combined output of all the stars in some Galaxies!
Supernovae can result in Neutron Stars or Black Holes or can end up with nothing left except an expanding cloud of radioactive plasma that slowly cools. The flash from a Supernova will be adequate to destroy all, or nearly all, life on all Worlds in the same Sector, and will significantly disrupt life in adjacent sectors. The plasma cloud expands at about 1 parsec per decade and is equally deadly on nearer Worlds that it passes.
Sophonts are advised that any Supernova should be avoided for the first few millennia after the initial explosion.
History & Background (Dossier)
The term "Nova" was first used by the Solomani on pre-spaceflight Terra to describe the sudden but temporary brightening of a star, or the temporary appearance of a "new" star in the night skies ("nova" being a word for "new" in the ancient Solomani language known as Latin). It was eventually discovered that novae occur when material from a companion star accretes onto the surface of a degenerate dwarf star (i.e. a "white dwarf") in sufficient quantity to initiate a runaway cataclysmic thermonuclear explosion on the degenerate dwarf surface, causing a sudden intense brightening of the star that can take weeks to completely fade away. It was later theorized and subsequently demonstrated that certain classes of novae could arise from the complete or near complete destruction of an entire star thru variuos mechanisms. Such novae were subsequently dubbed "Supernovae".
Worlds & Sectors (Astrography)
World Listing: 1116
The following stars and systems are associated with this astrographic feature:
References & Contributors (Sources)
|
This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Supernova. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |
- Author: BackworldTraveller