38 million years ago a star blew up

[Kershaw]

and we just found out about it this week.

pretty cool stuff.

[Rustyduktape]

Astronomy is so fucking cool.

One thing that will always stick with me (not exactly relevant to this), if you take a piece of printer paper, fold it in half and cut in half, and then fold those two pieces in half and cut them in half, and so on and so on. if you do that 100 times, the stack of paper would reach the most distant quasar from us in the universe. I read that in some old random astronomy textbook, haha, my friends and I used to just get baked and read from it, hahaha.

[TurboJake]

That must not have been weed. Must have been crack

That comes out to 500 pieces of paper... According to my caliper a piece of a paper is .003 inches thick.

500x.003" is 1.5"

Unless your not explaining it correctly. Fold in half, cut the halves.

[lambo]

I don't think 500 hundred pieces is correct because the number of pieces is increasing exponentially, correct?

So shouldn't it be somewhere in the realm of 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 pieces so 3,802,951,800,684,688,204,490,109,616.128 inches or 72,881,406,682,343,583,838,346,130.62785128 miles?

[Kershaw]

no, take each piece and cut it in half at each step and subsequent step and so forth. it's exponential growth. it's like the story of when chess was created.

When the creator of the game of chess showed his invention to the ruler of the country, the ruler was so pleased that he gave the inventor the right to name his prize for the invention. The man, who was very wise, asked the king this: that for the first square of the chess board, he would receive one grain of wheat (in some tellings, rice), two for the second one, four on the third one, and so forth, doubling the amount each time. The ruler, arithmetically unaware, quickly accepted the inventor's offer, even getting offended by his perceived notion that the inventor was asking for such a low price, and ordered the treasurer to count and hand over the wheat to the inventor. However, when the treasurer took more than a week to calculate the amount of wheat, the ruler asked him for a reason for his tardiness. The treasurer then gave him the result of the calculation, and explained that it would take more than all the assets of the kingdom to give the inventor the reward. The story ends with the inventor becoming the new king. (In other variations of the story the king punishes the inventor.)

it would be 18 million trillion grains of rice.

[kronus]

it's 2^100 * .003

[TurboJake]

That must be a big piece of paper, because there is no way there is enough atoms in an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper to form a single strand to the other end of the universe.

[lambo]

That must be a big piece of paper, because there is no way there is enough atoms in a piece of paper to form a single strand to the other end of the universe.

It's a hypothetical statement...

[TurboJake]

I see now.

Still, Astronomy and cosmology... Seriously fascinating stuff.

[Kershaw]

indeed it is, sir.

[kronus]

That must be a big piece of paper, because there is no way there is enough atoms in an 8.5 x 11 piece of paper to form a single strand to the other end of the universe.

have some back of the envelope calculations:

paper's about the same density as water... 1g/cm^3. let's assume it has about the same number of atoms per g. (this is a big assumption)
a sheet of paper weighs ~4.5g
there are 55.6 moles of water in 1 kg, which comes out to .2502 moles of water in something the size of a sheet of paper. there's about 6*10^23 atoms in a mole, so 1.5*10^23 atoms in a sheet of (water) paper.

2^100 is quite a lot bigger than 10^23, so it looks like you're right!

[e30slidewayz]

Maybe if you put every atom in the peice of paper end to end... but I still don't know if that would be a sufficient length to reach the farthest quasar.

[cale]

Yea I'm willing to be turbojake just overlooked that, it the thickness grows exponentially and scales up extremely fast once you get past a dozen or so folds. (wrote this before the last few posts, didn't mean to jump back to that)

It's pretty cool this happened, because just a few months ago we had a relatively closed type 1a supernova take place. It was heralded as the supernova of the half-century, even a strong set of binoculars was enough to see it. Really rare stuff, and even more rare to have two so close to us happen back to back.

Supernova's are pretty incredible things. The magnitude of them is relatively unfathomable for us to comprehend, one explosion is bright enough to outshine all the 100's of billions of other stars in the galaxy for a few weeks. To compare it to a scale we're more familiar with, some of the largest supernova have the nuclear equivalent 10^28 mt or several hundred Tsar Bomba 50mt h-bombs exploding for every cell, in every humans body on earth all at once. That's using the lower end of the average of 75-100 trillion cells per body. The scale is so big it almost appears as though the math is incorrect, but it is not. They're really that powerful.

[Rustyduktape]

fuckin love astronomy. and yeah, the paper folding thing is impossible, it's just a theory. doesnt mean I dont fold and rip scrap pieces of paper in half all the time ;-) haha.