If the Sun went nova today, what would be the first noticable effects on Earth?
How would things appear from the night side?
Would everything be destroyed at once, or would things deteriorate relatively slowly?
What would the daytime sky look like? Would it look like night?
How long would people survive and what would life be like for them?
If the Sun went Nova…93 million miles is diddle squat.
As for the changes leading up to a nova…I have no idea.
The first thing you’d notice would be all your dead relatives saying howdy.
IANAA so this is educated guessing:
First the Sun isn’t the right kind of star to go nova. Sounds like novas generally result from smaller white dwarfs that pull hydrogen off their binary companion, said hydrogen pools at the outside of the white dwarf and at some point undergoes fusion and bang, there’s your nova. It’s a great big hydrogen bomb going off, momentarily increasing the brightness of the star by a few hundred thousand times.
If that were to happen to the Sun, somehow, we wouldn’t notice anything at all for about 8 minutes (time it takes light to reach us from the Sun). Then it’d sure get really bright, really fast. Probably burn out every optic nerve in existence. I don’t know exactly how much energy is released or how long the flareup lasts but I have to think that it’d be like standing near the mother of all H-bomb explosions. The intense heat and radiation would vaporize and sterilize everything, leaving a ball of hot rock behind. Probably take fractions of a second.
There would probably be some other signs long before the big boom. Perhaps massive gravitational fluctuations and electo-magnetic storms. Might even take a few decades. Have modern scienctist ever been activly studying a star before it went super nova? Seems that I recall that they have, but I’m too lazy to google right now . . .
The imminent death of our sun would be preceded by a drastic change in the rate of neutrino emission. This we would detect long before the final eight minutes.
Larry Niven’s been there , kinda. Absolutely worth the read anyway.
Perhaps one of my fav sci-fi shorts!
Anyway, 8 minutes and then incineration. If our star was that sort, which it isn’t.
The OP may have been thinking about the Sun going SUPERNOVA, which sounds like it’s just a big nova but is a substantially different event.
Same result, though. We’d be vaporized instantly. (Waiting for the speed of light is instantly, physically speaking.)
:eek: Our geese are cooked :eek:
Um, we’d have 8 to 9 minutes, even at the speed of light.
One could even start a thread for best suggestions on how to pass the time!
How would we have a 8-9 minute warning since nothing could report back to us before the sun went nova?. We don’t have any Faster than Light communication system yet 
I say, old chap!
From earlier in the thread:
Fuji Kitakyusho: The imminent death of our sun would be preceded by a drastic change in the rate of neutrino emission. This we would detect long before the final eight minutes.
Si Amigo: There would probably be some other signs long before the big boom. Perhaps massive gravitational fluctuations and electo-magnetic storms.
…it will have to be marketed under a different name in Spanish-speaking countries :rolleyes: