Are there any records of someone in history or still living who happened to be looking at the night sky with a naked eye and witnessed a star become extinguished?
Do stars explode? What would I see with the naked eye if I was looking at a particular star in a constellation at the moment in time the light from that star explosion bounced off my retina?
Is there a way to tell which stars are next in line for the chop?
I am guessing we can’t, not to within a few million years anyway.
If a star is large enough, it explodes as part of its death throes. These are called novas (nor novae, if you want to go all Latin on us), and especially large ones are called supernovas. There are recorded instances where supernovas have been observed with the naked eye (some were so bright they could be seen in the daylight).
Probably the most famous example recoded in history was the supernova that became the Crab Nebula, as described in this link here.
I don’t think our study of stellar evolution is currently advanced enough to allow us to accurately predict the exact moment of a nova. Even if it were, however, these things don’t happen all that often.
Reagrds,
Barry
No, but I have seen pictures taken by the paparazzi of stars going out.
Boom, boom.
That was pretty good, Gorsnak. 
And then there was Supernova 1987A. I don’t know the star’s astronomical name, but it was in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Really cool picture from 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/sn1987a_hst.gif
Nitpick; a “nova” is not an exploding star. Only “supernova” refers to an exploding star. “Nova” is a phenomenon whereby, in a multiple star system, matter is sucked off the larger, less dense star - usually a main sequence or red star - to the smaller star - usually a white dwarf - which causes the matter sucked away to orbit the smaller star, get really hot, and then fuse and “blow up,” often on a regular basis. If the stars remain, that’s a nova, and they can sometimes keep doing this over and over again. They’re also called “Cataclysmic variables.” Sometimes the mass-transfer process CAN cause the smaller star to go totally boom, in which case you get a supernova - which is way, way more powerful than a nova.
“Supernova” is when a star explodes, which is what I think the OP was asking about. Exploding stars can sometimes leave behind neutron stars, or black holes, or nothing but a big cloud of dust, depending (I think) on the original mass of the star.
To answer the question directly: visible supernova are REALLY rare. One was visible in 1987, though you’d have to live way down south to have seen it, as it blew up in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that orbits our own, visible only from southern latitudes. A burst of neutrinos from that supernova was measured on Earth, and that was 200,000 light years away or something like that. As you can imagine, the impact of a supernova blowing up in a star system close to Earth would be extremely bad for us; luckily no nearby stars are going to go kablooey anytime soon.
The previous visible supernova was in 1604. Odds are we’ll never see another with the naked eye as long as we live.
the Small Magellanic Cloud:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Orbit/2142/
Supernova 1987a:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/StarDeath/sn1987a.html
Rickjay, i thought the nova you are talking about is a super nova, but a super nova type I. When a star explodes, it is a supernova type II, i’m almost certain.
I saw a star explode when Humphrey Bogart lost it and slapped wassername in that film that I can’t remember the name of, and didn’t George C. Scott do the same in “Patton” 
I would think supernovae would be the only type of thing we could see, at least naked eye. For a star to change to the point where it was no longer sending out visible light would take millions to billions of years to never, if I understand stellar evolution correctly.
I think RickJay’s pretty much got it. A ‘nova’ is when a star increases in brightness then decreases to its former brightness over a certain period (usually a white dwarf which accretes matter from a companion star and suddenly flares up in a burst of hydrogen fusion). A ‘supernova’ is now the term used for when a star explodes. There are two general classes of supernovae: Type I and Type II. A Type II supernova is the result of a dying massive star that can no longer produce enough energy in its core to fight off gravitational collapse. The interior of the core collapses into a Neutron Star or a Black Hole, while the outer layers of a star explode. Supernova 1987a was a Type II supernova.
Type I supernovae when white dwarfs explode (a white dwarf is a dead star composed mostly of carbon; think of it as a really huge glowing coal). There is a certain mass for a star (called the Chandrasekhar Limit) above which a star will undergo the collapase/explosion like a Type II Supernova. White dwarfs are all stars with mass under the Chandrasekhar Limit (our Sun is also under this limit, thus is destined to live out the end of its life as a white dwarf). A white dwarf around a companion star can accrete enough matter to push its mass above the Chandrasekhar limit, and thus undergo a supernova.
OK, some definitions:
Nova - "A star that brightens suddenly and to an unprecedented degree, creating the impression that a new star has appeared where none was before. Hence the name, from nova for “new”. "
Supernova - Type I - when a low mass star, with a degenerate core, explodes. It has a hydrogen poor spectrum. These are fairly uncommon, and occur in old, low mass stars.
Type II - are when a young, high mass star explodes. These have hydrogen rich spectra, and are far more common in our galaxy - they occur at a rate of 0.01 to 0.05 per year.
So, theoretically, you could see a star “go out” so to speak, but not with the naked eye, and you’d need to know exactly where to look. But over the course of 20-100 years, if you scanned the sky religiously, day and night, you might just see a star die.
All stars die eventually, but not all die in a supernova. Only the largest stars go “bang”, and when they do, what’s left is a cloud of gas with a neutron star or black hole in the center (the Crab nebula is a good example of one of these clouds. There’s a neutron star in the center that you can’t see in this photo).
Mid-range stars like our Sun will die with a “poof”, not a “bang”, leaving something called a planetary nebula (the name is a misnomer; they have nothing to do with planets). A planetary nebula has a white dwarf in the center. The best-known planetary nebula is the Ring Nebula; in this case the central object is visible.
And the lightest-weight (and dimmest) of stars, the red dwarfs, don’t do anything in particular to mark the end of their life. It’s believed that they just fade dimmer and dimmer, and gradually become something called a “black dwarf”: A clump of hydrogen and helium that used to be a star, but now is dark (the term “black dwarf” can also refer to a former white dwarf that has gone dark). Red dwarfs can last for trillions of years, so the Universe isn’t nearly old enough yet for any of them to have died yet.
But back to supernovae. We can’t predict exactly when a star is going to go, but we can make some estimates. All of the red stars you can see with naked eye in the sky (Antares, Arcturus, Regulus, Betelgeuse, etc.) are red giants, which are stars that are getting close to dying. Betelgeuse in particular is getting very close. Perhaps sometime in the next thousand years or so, we’ll see it outshining the full moon to become the second-brightest object in the sky, fading out over a period of months to a few years until it’s no longer visible to the naked eye at all. Right now, we can’t make any predictions more precise than “about a thousand years”, but people are watching it almost continuously, and we’ll probably see some more immediate warning signs before it blows.
This is a really cool prospect. So this will be like having two moons in the sky at the same time for a short period. Would the expanded planet appear to be similar in size to the moon or would it remain pinpoint small to the naked eye but intensely bright? Would it still be visible in the daytime?
Has anyone thought about the effect this would have on animal wildlife, focusing on nocturnal creatures in general?
As I recall, astronomy books tell of astronomer, Tycho Brahe’s recorded details after witnessing a supernova in the constellation, Cassiopeia. Maybe some SDoper has the approximate year of this event… - Jinx
It’s called Tycho’s Supernova, and it went off in 1572.
Do you have a cite for this? That seems very extreme.
What an extraordinary coincidence.
It’s sort of hard to cite an event that hasn’t happened yet but it makes sense to me.
Doing the math, the absolute magnitude of a star like Betelgeuse exploding would be in the order of -14 to -16 - meaning it would have a magnitude of about -14 to -16 from a distance of 32.6 light years. That would make it, oh, about 631 times brighter than the Moon if it (the supernova, not the Moon) were 32.6 light years away, though still about 27,000 times less bright than the Sun. (The Moon is magnitude -8, the sun magnitude -26.8; each point of magnitude is a power of 2.5, so seven points of magnitude difference is 631 times brighter. It goes backwards; more negative is brighter.)
Betelgeuse is 425 light years away, or about 13 times further away than the absolute magnitude distance. Assuming an absolute magnitude of -15, that will reduce its brightness by 169 times, therefore making it still about four times brighter than the Moon, an apparent magnitude of something like -9.5.
I believe my math and assumptions are correct here; Betelgeuse, were it to go supernova, would for several months be as much as three or four times brighter than a full Moon, though still just a tiny fraction of daylight brightness. It would almost certainly be clearly visible in most daylight conditions. Even after the explosion was gone you would be able to see the resulting nebula with the naked eye under a reasonably dark sky just as you can see the Great Nebula in Orion (not too far away from Betelgeuse.)
Two more candidates for supernovaship;
Rho Cassiopeia and Eta Carina.
I think there are about seven likely bangers found so far in our galaxy, or what we can see of it.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
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It’s sort of hard to cite an event that hasn’t happened yet but it makes sense to me.
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I think you understood what I meant. Thanks for the answer. I had to do a little further searching though for information on what astronomers expect of Betelgeuse. I didn’t really find as much as I thought I would. I did find this story on Space.com though.
I’m not sure where they came by their figure (could be a WAG), but they seem to think that it will become about as bright as a crescent moon. From most of what I’ve read, it’s really not even a sure thing that Betelgeuse will go super nova.
