I would assume we wouldn't hear anything, even if we were right next to it. Am I right?

You'd be long dead before any matter that could transmit any sound could get near you anyway.

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It depends on how big your microphone is.

You're right Kordic - no sound. No medium in which the sound can travel (no air). And also what LucasVB said.

*click click*

(Lights on, lights out)

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If your nose runs and your feet smell, you could be upside down! O_o
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There was a man who entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in
ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win.
Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

Like a Disaster Area concert with all their amps turned down to seven.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Well, first off, the temperature in your spacecraft would reach critical levels, perhaps it would start to envaporate in space. Probably you'd hear a lot of poping sounds and a lot of warning alarms. Perhaps a computer saying, "Warning, internal breech. Oxygen at critical levels". That is of course, if you closed your shutters on your windows. If not, you're probably blind. If you managed to survive that and perhaps got into your space suit, you'd be facing a heating problem and using coolant at a fast rate. If you can hold out for a day or two, then then actuall blast wave, the stellar material, would finally strike your craft. It would sound like fine sand hitting your car during a sand storm. You probably wouldn't survive long after that. That stellar material is ripping your ship and you apart. You'd be sucking vaccuum soon, then, at that point, you wouldn't care what a supernova sounded like.

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Fields of Space

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

I know we've had this discussion before, probably six months ago. Check the archives for it. There absolutely would be a sound: space is not empty! The SN would set up a shock wave that would pretty much be a huge sonic boom, and then there'd be the expected rumblings that follow, just like when a fast jet flies over you on Earth. This is complicated by the fact that radiation is also affecting the SN shock front, as are magnetic effects... but it's the same idea.

Here is the first thing that popped up on Yahoo... an interesting article. Here's a paper with some nice plots of wave structures.

Anyway, the old thread had lots of info from people who know more than me. Hunt around for it.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

According to a newspaper article mentioned in the bad astronomy book, apparently supernovae sound like human souls screaming while being tormented in hell, so there you go. Though the article did say that the supernova was acually a black hole... Made me laugh for about ten minutes, that one did. Or maybe I'm just easily amused.

We know that shock waves can travel though the intersteller medium, but the attenuation is very high at audible frequencies, so I suppose you might hear something as the subaudible wave of extreme intensity, dismantled all the near by structures, including your body. Neil

Uh... Those of you who claim "no sound" are incorrect.

As the blast front hits the atmosphere, it produces sound. I would imagine it to be equivalent to the sound of a thousand hurricanes and tornadoes combined.

Whether or not you actually get to hear that sound depends on how far your planet is away from the supernova. If it's next door, the blast front will be supersonic, and you'll never hear what hit you. If you're distant, it'll be subsonic, and you'll hear it, hopefully as a dull roar in the background while you're grilling hamburgers for the family. Later that evening, you and family will go to bed!

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

I suspect that if you are close enough to a supernova to hear it, you will be dead from one of two causes before it even starts to brighten.

• It may be possible to feel the gravity waves from the explosion squeezing and stretching your body. It might be strong enough to crush you.
• If the gravity waves don't get you, the neutrino burst might. If you are close enough you may get a big enough dose of neutrinos which will cause many beta decays in your body and possibly kill you in a few hours, just as the supernova lights up.

I'm just no fun at all.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I assumed, maybe incorrectly, that he was in some sort of spaceship in order to be "right next to it".

BOOM!!!!!!

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

No,

KA-BLAM!!!!!!!

and that's at least fourth time I've gotten to use that title this week.

And thank you for showing me how to do font size changes.

LOL - Thanks for the support, guys! Large fonts and all.

Yeah, if you're close enough, it'd be the loudest sound you'd ever hear.

CM - I'm intrigued about the neutrino causing beta decay. I thought thousands of them are passing through me every second, that they pass through the Earth, and despite their abundance, they're so difficult to detect that to date the evidence for them is sketchy, even deep inside the Earth.

Now you're saying that a supernova event would have so many (perhaps a trillion-trillion times what the sun generates in a year) that the exceedingly few collisions that do occur would be plentiful enough to kill me?

I guess Star Trek, TNG, shouldn't have been so close to that supernova...

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

I was thinking that neutrinos are harmless...
Celestial Mechanics are you sure that you are not confusing them with the neutrons?
I would except harm from them.
I do not know if neutron radiation is produced in the supernova explosion but at these energies I would expect anything.
Gamma radiation will probably kill you in a milisecond anyway, only if you had an unobtainium shielding or was buried under a kilometers of solid lead.
Or if you were a few light years from the explosion, you may get the lethal dose but you will have symptoms only for a while then there will be a relatively long latent period (5-20 days) and then you will experience severe diarrhea and internal bleeding and then - you will die painfully .
Horrible to even think about.
If you will get a bit lower dose and you will very quickly warp to home, you may be saved by a bone marrow transplantation almost immediatelly after the exposure.
One of the essential laws for an interstellar adventurer IS - NEVER, I REPEAT NEVER WANDER AROUND SUPERNOVAS AND OTHER COSMIC IONIZING RADIATION SOURCES UNLESS YOU HAVE AN INCREDIBLY GOOD SHIELDING!!!!!
Or do it at your own risk, but risk a very painful death from radiation exposure.

Neutrinos don't have a zero chance of interacting with normal matter, they just have an extremely low chance (otherwise, we wouldn't be able to detect them). I'm guessing that at a high enough concentration, even with the low odds, that enough interact with atoms in your body to cause problems. But that's just my guess.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Yes, but I would guess that gamma would be of more concern and I never read about neutrinos causing beta decay.

Like Flat Earthers, there are moments in a supernova explosion when the material of the star is unbelievably dense. As I understand it, the interior of the star collapses inward, and then bounces back outwards, fantastically compressing the star stuff that didn't already fall in. With a vengence. There is also a huge blast of neutrinos coming out of the center, which hits the compressed shell, the shell by this time being so dense that the neutrinos interact with it. Voila, all kinds of secondary radiation.

There's probably better documentation on this elsewhere. Try Wiki for starters.

edit: Yes, the Wiki article is good. And there are still a lot of unanswered questions about supernova.