Celestia Forums

Reading through some other posts and links, it say's there are over 200billion stars in our galaxy. I read somewhere a long time ago that a certain percentage of stars larger than some given mass go supernova after a short (compared to our sun's) life time.

Given the size of the known universe and the huge number of stars I'd expect stars to be going "nova" regularly. Since the energy levels are so high and bright they sould be seen from much further after the fact as compared to before.

So why aren't there more supernova's being seen?

Regards,

1) Even supernovas are very dim when viewed from hundreds of millions of light years away.
2) They are not visible for a long time.
3) It is impossible tell when and in which galaxy supernova explodes in a given time.

That means we need powerful search telescope with a large field of view, which leads to huge data flow. In future we'll have telescopes such as Large Synoptic Telescope and amount of found supernovae should 'explode' then.

Thanks Ynjevi,

Tempararily forgot the time scales involved. Even if the after effects can be seen for many years it's only a small percentage of the life cycle. Some of the descriptions I've read seem to imply they are visible from far greater distances than they probably are. Guess I'll take a more sceptical outlook when reading articles.