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.

Well… I wasn’t expecting to read something like this today. Nor indeed, tomorrow and yesterday!

EDIT:

Then there’s this, pointing out unbelievable stuff along the way, effortlessly. You gotta love Randall Munro.

Core collapse supernovae happen to giant stars, so if you observed a supernova from that distance, you’d probably be inside the outer layers of the star that created it.