Every Type Of Space Explosion Explained in 11 Minutes

In 1859, an explosion on the Sun set telegraph paper on fire here on Earth. And a star 3,000 light-years away could blow up any night now. Those are the two smallest explosions in this video. This video goes through every type of space explosion, from our own Sun to the biggest explosion since the Big Bang, and for each one checks what it would do to you: solar flares, novas, Type Ia and core-collapse supernovas, hypernovas, pair-instability supernovas, magnetar flares, kilonovas, gamma-ray bursts, the Cow, stars torn apart by black holes, and the eruption in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Every number comes from a published study or a space agency. Danger distances are estimates from published models. Comparisons like "a teaspoon weighs as much as an elephant", "boil away every ocean" and "blow apart a galaxy like ours dozens of times over" are our own rounded calculations from the published numbers. #space #astronomy #supernova 0:00 Intro: every explosion and what it would do to you 0:24 Solar flare: the Carrington Event of 1859 1:32 Nova: T Coronae Borealis, due any night 2:28 Type Ia supernova: a dead star blows itself apart 3:22 Core-collapse supernova: how giant stars die 4:19 Hypernova: a star that becomes a black hole 5:06 Pair-instability supernova: the star that leaves nothing 6:05 Magnetar flare: a starquake 6:55 Kilonova: where your gold comes from 7:56 Gamma-ray burst: the Brightest Of All Time 8:47 The Cow: the explosion nobody can explain 9:37 Tidal disruption: a star torn apart by a black hole 10:31 Cluster eruption: the biggest explosion since the Big Bang 11:13 Which one would you watch from a safe distance? Sources Carrington Event, 1859: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_E... Severe Space Weather Events: societal and economic impacts (National Research Council, 2008): https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/... T Coronae Borealis, the recurrent nova: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Coronae_Bo... Type Ia supernova: the Chandrasekhar limit and standard candles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_Ia_supe... SN 1006, visible in daytime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1006 Nobel Prize in Physics 2011: the accelerating universe: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/... SN 1987A and its neutrinos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A Ozone depletion from nearby supernovae (Gehrels et al., 2003): https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0211361 SN 1998bw and GRB 980425: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1998bw Eta Carinae: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae SN 2018ibb, the best pair-instability supernova candidate (Schulze et al., 2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.05796 The breaking strain of neutron star crust (Horowitz & Kadau, 2009): https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1986 A magnetar giant flare in the galaxy M82 (Mereghetti et al., Nature 2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14645 SGR 1806-20, the giant flare of 2004 (NASA): https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/watch... GW170817: gravitational waves from a neutron star merger (LIGO): https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/press-re... Could a kilonova kill? (Perkins et al., ApJ 2024): https://www.universetoday.com/165564/how-d... GRB 221009A, the BOAT, a 1-in-10,000-year burst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRB_221009A Gamma-ray bursts and a mass extinction (Melott et al., 2004): https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309415 AT2018cow, the Cow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT2018cow AT2022cmc, a jet pointed at Earth (Andreoni et al., Nature 2022): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022... Extreme nuclear transients (Hinkle et al., Science Advances 2025): https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2025/06/04/big... The Ophiuchus cluster eruption (Giacintucci et al., 2020; NASA Chandra): https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2020/oph...