Supernova

In reading my non-fiction book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson, he has made several intriguing statements. The first I found when reading about supernovae. He said a supernova "occurs when a giant star, much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns... 'like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once.' " (30).

I decided to blog about this because trying to imagine what one hydrogen bomb can do or what it's like is difficult enough, but to imagine a trillion hydrogen bombs is completely inconceivable. He goes on to say that "if a supernova explosion happened within five hundred light years of us, we would be goners." (30) If you think of how long a single light year is (about six trillion miles), for one single explosion to reach that far and cause damage can seem unimaginable; but 500 light years is even more beyond belief. As suggested in 'The Educated Imagination', being humans we can only imagine what we have seen or experienced on earth; the human experience. What goes on in the universe is much bigger than we are and can seem completely ridiculous on such a large scale. The truth is, we only occupy a microscopic place in the universe even though sometimes it seems everything revolves around life here. Bryson has made this clear with several examples in his book and this was one of the ones I found the most intriguing.