Transcription
This is going to be the second half of a bold prediction where what you notice and identify and forecast comes true beyond the ever-shrinking shadows of doubt. We have had several battles, most notably two with Harvard and a very big one with NASA. Those went our way, but the forecast of field of science against expectation is another matter.
In June of 2021, just under a year ago, we rather boldly proclaimed and demonstrated there was an upheaval in nova astronomy. That the models were too restrictive, that the recurrent and smaller ones didn't need binary stars, that they could be smaller than known solar flares from the sun. And we forecast that the discoveries would continue to push the boundaries of the expected, and that more and more of the science would push towards the eventual realization that the solar micro nova is possible.
Let's re-watch some key portions of that video, be reminded of how absurd the field of nova science has become, and then I'll show you what's happened since then.
When you hear the word nova, most think of supernova, the violent endings of stars. Many don't know that some supernova leave behind a star, and sometimes more than one. Most don't know that the vast majority of nova events are not supernova, but smaller versions called cataclysmic variables. They're classified as either classical nova, dwarf nova, or rapidly recurrent nova, although all three are thought to be repeating on various time scales, from one in Andromeda that were currently nova's every Earth year, to some classical nova that are on millions of years for current scales.
The scenario where one star feeds off another, accretes an atmospheric layer, and the interior pressure builds to nova is said to occur for some kinds of supernova, and all classical nova, and all rapidly recurrent nova. But this paradigm has come crashing down so fast, it's not even in the textbooks yet. Stars without a degenerate binary requiring tweaks to mechanisms. The one about sporadic accretion nova is exceptional because the implications are that short-term events could replace a binary star. The poor little star that wandered into a molecular cloud and exploded all by itself is an exceptional example. One of those short-term events, along with the other so-called dark nova remnants discovered since that initial discovery. And then there were the single star nova events. This one observers may recall was a supernova, and to this day, almost no binaries are observed at the smaller nova events. It's all theoretical. How many of those smaller ones are singles?
When we look at nova remnants, so often there is that star left behind in the middle. The explanation for there only being one is that the other one exploded or was blasted out of the system. But how many were singles to begin with?
In the last few years, we have seen the nova science get very weird, and that's being polite. At the supernova level, the dozens of names for small transient events are almost all said to be interaction driven, accretion, exchange of material, and reaction, just like the outburst of an active galactic nucleus when it shreds and eats a star. With several studies showing how non-accretion events can actually trigger anova, specifically in the way the plasma turbulence disrupts and kicks the magnetic system of the star. The mechanisms to trigger anova are expanding like milk spilled on the kitchen floor.
Just look at these planetary nebula, a spectacularly awful name for a nova remnant, by the way. Do they look like there is just a tiny window of mechanisms? Every star is different in size, chemistry, magnetism, and more. Those with binaries have different sizes and compositions in orbital distances and accretion rates. The others encounter things like plasma, dust, and gas clouds, or magnetic disruptions of other kinds. It looks like the faces of nova events are as broad as milk spilled on the kitchen floor.
One in particular that is said to be specifically different in terms of its character is the dwarf nova. Dwarf nova are said to not occur on the star, but in the accretion disk around the star. These have lower energies, so they need a way to explain how that could happen, which is why they look to the accretion disk. But they also need to explain a variety of dwarf nova scenarios, as is done with many other nova. Dwarf nova come in various flavors themselves, sometimes masquerading as an imposter. They tend to clump all the low energy events into a nova-like event category with dwarf nova type one x-ray bursts, dust production events, outer layer sheddings, mass loss events, luminous transients, and many other names.
Truth is, while they have seen many disks around stars, they've never seen one then produce a dwarf nova, and at no dwarf nova ever have they seen the resolution needed to resolve a disk of any kind. It's all theory to try to make up for how small anovas they're seeing in the cosmos.
Now that we have spilled the nova milk, literally everywhere, let's ask how powerful nova events really are. Well, you can find the supernova and hypernova rising to 10 to the 48 ergs or more. But for the surprise of nova events, we have to explore the lower end of the range. We have long known that some small nova are only as strong as super flares on our sun. We have seen many that are much lower, with several reaching down to the 10 to the 31 or 30 erg range, and maybe even lower. They are also finding supernova that are so small, they challenge the mechanisms of those bigger blasts as well.
The big effect described by NASA here is on the models. Right now, the nova energy range from hypernova down to the smallest recognized nova events is already quite large. Now keep that lower end in mind as we come to the sun for a moment. The 1859 Carrington event super flare was 10 to the 32 ergs, bigger than literally dozens of officially recognized nova. The centennial level storms too match the lowest range. Some nova are no bigger than what the sun does every 11 years in solar flaring x-ray energy. That's a small nova, and the sun's maximum power range is likely well above that, a hundred to a thousand times.
This is the consensus of not only recent journal literature, but the recent authoritative book from the American Geophysical Union on the subject. And the sun is not even a powerful super flare star. We've seen super flares on other stars up to 10 to the 40 ergs, 10 million times more powerful than the sun's flares, much higher than many nova events.
This is a fun little graphic that can help show you that flaring events on stars and nova events have a ton of crossover in the energy range. Across the bottom is the 10 to the number of ergs. While supernovas still reach the highest ranges, it's a lot more of a mix in those lower ranges than most think of when they think of the word nova. You can see here that the idea of these being superiorly different in terms of power is definitely false.
And as if the low level of energy to small nova isn't surprising enough, that's just those they officially call nova. What about those other events, super far away, where they give one of the other random names based on a light curve and no close-end images of the system? If some supernova eruptions can't even destroy the planets around them, certainly the smaller nova are going to leave their planets as well.
What about the nova event they saw with no ejection at all? The no nova nova. They continued to discover little ones they had missed before as the technology gets better. After a few years, what else are they likely to discover? Using retired satellites, they're already stacking images and finding over half the nova were missed, just as was in the story from this past week.
And then there are all those stars that darken, that blink out, and then come back on. There are many more than you think. Some blamed on exoplanets, and some surely are exoplanets, but not all. What about Betelgeuse, which dimmed, re-brightened without a nova event? Another star that blinked, folks. The nova scale might have to go all the way down to an event where an accreted or accumulated layer blocks out the starlight, and then the pushing off of that outer shell is slow and gradual, such that it seems that there is no luminosity, no nova event, just the dust ejection. In fact, those could have solar flare level energies associated, but such observing campaigns are almost never done.
And from this perspective, when you think about a small nova with no ejection on one side of a scale, and the small inova that are just blinkers with no luminosity on the other, the nova at a pulsar type one x-ray burst, which wouldn't even reach Mercury if it happened on the sun, doesn't even seem so weird anymore. The point is that nova are much broader in actor than most believe, like milk spilled on the kitchen floor, and that's before the cleanup of what astronomy still considers new discovery down to the no ejection nova and the stars that blink.
So again, there have been several new types of nova discovered, and that's before you remember they give other names to other ones due to how variable they can be. They obviously look so different from one another that a wide array of progenitor scenarios is probable. But now comes the hard part. Could we take what was truly decades worth of scientific change in only a matter of years, and then out do that in just one year? That won't be as wordy as last year's video. Are you ready?
Just one week after that video, another new type of supernova was discovered. After several more dwarf nova proved challenging to classify, another new type of nova was discovered. Two more in less than a year, and more this decade than in the last century. There have been more discoveries like the no ejection nova, and more dimmings in the past, reviewed again in light of the blinking star, no luminosity nova events. It is firmly established that the circumstellar medium is a perfectly good descriptor of the accreting material, since a binary star is no longer absolutely required. This is already how many dwarf nova are said to work. Why would it be any different or matter where that extra material comes from? Indeed, it is now firmly supported that many of the known nova may be singles. And this is the first study and survey of its kind with modern level technology. Any guesses what subsequent studies will find with giant stars blinking or plainly having their repeated nova events visible?
We now have the range of known recurring nova on stars smaller than the sun, larger than the sun, with and without binaries, above, below, left, right, in front, and behind the sun. And let's just go ahead and add on a third new type of nova from the last year. That's right, the micro nova. The word we invented several years ago, the one that's got us called everything from crazy to pseudo scientists and worse, turns out is a thing. The immediate focus is on the binary production, and one can't be too mad if they're going with a long-favored explanation for extra material getting dumped onto a star. And as we've said, that surely does work as a mechanism, but again, a binary is not required for other nova, and it's not required for a micro nova, just a source of extra material in the stellar atmosphere. Micronova makes another new kind of nova, and a cherry on top, as they're even discovering new kinds of stars. Yeah, this is what a scientific field in upheaval looks like.
Speaking of extra material at a star, just so happens that we know what dumping material down through our sun's corona will do: trigger mass ejections. This is just one of several papers on the topic recently. Coronal rain triggering the ejections, and why would it be any different of a triggering than when it happens across an entire star? An anova occurs, by the way. This entire concept of accumulated material causing eruptions means sun-diving comets can cause solar eruptions too.
So folks, that is what it looks like when there is a revolutionary epoch of a scientific field, and then an even more impressive version occurs in less than one year, all while arriving at the same conclusion as we do from geophysical evidence and galactic astrophysics: the sun can nova. It has many times at micro nova level, and will again at the end of the current age of Earth, which well over half of you watching will be alive to see. Learn more at the Earth Disaster documentary listed and linked below the video, and with our books at otf.cells.com. I'll see you in the morning for the daily update. Eyes open, no fear. Be safe, everyone.