[...]The physicist who mentioned this problem to me told me his rule of thumb for estimating supernova-related numbers: However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that.
Here's a question to give you a sense of scale:
Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina:
1. A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or
2. The detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?
Applying the physicist rule of thumb suggests that the supernova is brighter. And indeed, it is ... by nine orders of magnitude.
Is there even a theoretical way that this could happen? Seems essentially impossible. The whole thing with neutrinos is they just _don't_ interact with anything except _extremely_ rarely.
No. There is some evidence that a large flux of neutrinos can very slightly alter the rate of some nuclear beta decay (basically the decay which would release a neutrino can't if there are too many neutrinos already around it), but that won't do anything to trigger a nuclear weapon or nuclear plant meltdown. Even producing enough neutrinos to have a detectable effect at all would require a tremendous amount of energy - attempts to even detect such an effect on earth have been inconclusive. The only place in the universe where the neutron flux gets high enough to actually delay decay for a meaningful amount of time is in the core of a supernova, which is one way heavy elements are produced.
> The only place in the universe where the neutron flux gets high enough to actually delay decay for a meaningful amount of time is in the core of a supernova, which is one way heavy elements are produced.
They can’t be focused, so if it did succeed - it would cook everything anywhere near it just as much. So think ‘interplanetary death ray’, not ‘surgical strike’.
