3208: SNEWS

SNEWS

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Title text: People say setting of fireworks indoors is dangerous, but I looked at their energy release and it's like 10^-40 foe; totally negligible.

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Explanation

Ponytail is showing Hairy her bedroom. Hairy asks about the large device on the ceiling, and Ponytail explains that it is part of the SNEWS (SuperNova Early Warning System). This detects neutrinos (tiny particles that travel near the speed of light, rarely interacting with matter) to give pre-notice of supernovae, as neutrinos are produced in large quantities during the collapse of the star core, which occurs hours before the main photon production. She explains this gives astronomers warning, allowing them to observe the event with telescopes and other instruments.

Ponytail employs hyperbole, because even if they were all interested in supernovae, not every astronomer or observatory will be immediately situated to view a particular point in the sky. For example, they may need to wait for the Earth's rotation, causing the phenomenon to "rise" in the east. Others may be located at unfavorable latitudes where the object will never appear above the Earth's horizon. And, it may take some time before the supernova reaches an apparent magnitude that is visible during the daytime.

Hairy reasonably assumes that it is either detector, forming part of the SNEWS, or some kind of telescope to be used in the event the SNEWS goes off. However, Ponytail explains that it is a fireworks launcher, for the purposes of waking her up so she can witness the supernova herself. This is a very bad idea for a multitude of reasons. Reckless use of fireworks is already known for causing significant property damage and personal injury even when used outdoors; launching fireworks inside the house means causing an explosion in a confined area, guaranteeing that it will hit the building, maximizing the opportunity for the conflagration to ignite something flammable on the structure, and containing and therefore amplifying the sound of the burst (which can already deafen people who are too close).

Some people don't easily wake up to a simple alarm clock, especially if it is in reach and has a "snooze" function where a button will silence the alarm for several minutes before it beeps again. Note the similar sounds of "snooze" and SNEWS may be part of the joke.

Since historical supernovae have been visible from 6 months to nearly 2 years, it would be unlikely that Ponytail sleeps through a new one in its entirety, although there would still be significant cachet for any astronomer lucky enough to be able to legitmately say that they had seen the 'first light' at the earliest opportunity. It would also be difficult for her to not sleep through part of the supernova, for the same reason.

Understandably, Hairy leaves to sleep at his own house.

The comic title "SNEWS" is an acronym from the beginning of the strip: SuperNova Early Warning System. It is also a play on "news"

The title text is a play on the tremendous amount of energy released by a supernova. The foe is an unofficial unit of energy equal to 10^44 Joule (but named directly from initials in the original quantity of "ten to the fifty-one ergs", involving a pre-SI measurement of energy), which is approximately on the order of the usual amount of energy released by a supernova. In comparison, human-scale amounts of energy — even relatively significant ones such as firework detonations — are negligible. This ignores the fact that energy releases that are "negligible in comparison to a supernova" can still be easily fatal to humans; even the largest man-made nuclear explosion is approximately twenty-seven orders of magnitude less than the baseline 'foe' value. The described "10^-40 foe" is equal to 10 kJ, the energy released by the complete combustion of about 0.6 g of table sugar (sucrose), or the decomposition of about 6 g of nitrocellulose.

Transcript

This is one of 45 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Ponytail is walking into her room. The room has a bed, a set of drawers and a large sci-fi device mounted on the ceiling. Hairy is standing in the room, pointing up at the device.]

Hairy: What's that device?

Ponytail: Part of the supernova early warning system.

Ponytail: There hasn't been a Milky Way supernova in over a century.

Ponytail: Astronomers don't want to miss the next one.

[Close up of Ponytail, now sitting on the end of the bed]

Ponytail: 20 years ago, we set up a supernova alert system using neutrino detectors.

Ponytail: It should give us a few hours' advance notice.

[In a frame-less panel the view zooms back out, showing Ponytail and Hairy.]

Ponytail: If it ever goes off, every astronomer on earth will scramble to point their equipment at the sky.

Hairy: Oh, OK. So is that a detector? Or some kind of telescope?

[The panel moves to the right, showing Hairy walking away. Ponytail is still on the end of the bed, raising a clenched fist for dramatic effect.]

Ponytail: Fireworks launcher.

Ponytail: I refuse to sleep through a supernova.

Hairy: I think I'll spend the night at my place instead.

Trivia

The word "off" is misspelled as "of" in the title text.

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Discussion

The title text SNEWS is a reference to SuperNova_Early_Warning_System. 2a09:bac2:3656:ebe::178:123 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~) 21:58, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

No, you're wrong. It stands for Southeast, North East West South, since those are the directions where it can detect them. - 45.178.1.151 01:41, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

F1RST! also i posted this when there was no explanation. please fix this 2605:59c8:22e3:3e14:95a1:c5da:4c49:c384 (talk) 22:55, 16 February 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Is this my mediocre non-native English, or should the title text read "setting off fireworks indoors"? (Trivia?) --2001:A62:5F7:FB01:538E:3F07:C9F0:F0C0 23:06, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, 'setting of fireworks indoors, ...' would mean setting them up (i.e., placing them) and not 'setting off', lighting or detonating the fireworks. Sameldacamel34 (talk) 23:22, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

You can talk of setting explosives (the setting of them, as passively ready, to make them ready for later "setting them off"), so I expect the "setting of fireworks" is pretty much the same thing, much as with the setting of an alarm clock.

Though also sounds like a possible americanism, like "lit it on fire" (c.f. my own prefered "set light to it"), if only because the former seem tautilogical; and/or strangely long-winded, such as with "to burglarize" vs. just "to burgle" (both being what a burglar does upon his burglary). But it's not one of those many funny transatlantic dialect things I've noticed previously, so I could be overexplaining what actually is merely a typo. 82.132.239.3 01:33, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I could see it as a missing word "setting off of fireworks indoors" seems OK in American to me, though then I'd want a the: "The setting off of fireworks indoors"Lord Pishky (talk) 05:57, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

It snew Yaokuan ITB (talk) 23:28, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Exactly my thoughts, Yaokuan 216.25.182.141 23:58, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Gesundheit! Logalex8369 (talk) 01:35, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, it somehow escaped me when editing the explanation that neutrinos have mass!! (even though we've known about this for decades). Does this mean that if the supernova is far away enough, the photons will arrive before the neutrinos? Or is that threshold too far to matter? Sameldacamel34 (talk) 01:21, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes, but the threshold is too far away to have happened yet. Supernova neutrinos have 10^10 to 10^20 MeV. Judging by the table at the Overview on neutrino speed, assuming we are about right about the mass of a neutrino, neutrinos that energetic would be traveling within a factor of 10^-42 of c, so they would need to have traveled for "a few"×10⁴² light hours, or a few 10³⁸ years for the photons to catch up. Since the universe is less than 1.4×10¹⁰ years old, it'll be another few 10³⁸ years until that happens. DoSnews (talk) 03:46, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah, interesting. And at that distance, the supernova would have to be unimaginably big to even notice/detect? Also, wouldn't it have to be far away enough that it would have traveled for so long the light gets redshifted into oblivion? Sameldacamel34 (talk) 04:17, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Since SN neutrino detections are tens of neutrinos an increase of even a few times the distances currently detected would render the neutrino pulse undetectable. And the optical event is stretched by time for the photons to migrate to the surface as well as glow from material heated by the explosion and decay heat from ejected material. If we consider only those photons from the explosion "lucky" enough to manage not to hit anything on the way out of the star/remnant they should arrive first by an undetectable time. Also, the explosion itself once triggered has to propagate across millions of miles of the stellar core so the explosion event is at least several seconds long.Lord Pishky (talk) 05:47, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Not 10¹⁰–10²⁰, but 10–20. 84.2.109.134 06:30, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

my first edit in almost 5 months i think lol P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 01:45, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

One of the firework launchers on the device is aimed directly at the bed. Xkdvd (talk) 03:06, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Is it? Hard to tell in a 2d drawing... --Lupo (talk) 07:11, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

"Ponytail is showing Hairy her bedroom." is the most hilariously euphemistic explanation of what's going on. 82.13.184.33 09:24, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Contrary to the current explanation, a foe is *exactly* equal to 10^44 joules, by definition. 1 erg is 10^-7 J and 1 foe is 10^51 erg. Also, I feel there is a [Citation required] somewhere in the section about the dangers of indoor fireworks. (Not happy about having to run Google's Javascript and helping train their image recognition algorithms on unfamiliar foreign street scenes in order to post here.) 78.33.10.10 11:22, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I took it as being that while a foe is exactly that many joules (being a cm/g/s system derivative, not a m/kg/s one), neither a foe nor the equivalent value in joules are exactly the size of that which we might call a 'foe event', for which it was coined. But might have needed rewriting, as with the whole page (loads of little paragraphs and additions to paragaphs, now, at least needs more sensible reordering/grouping of facts and conjectures). 82.132.239.216 11:58, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I'll take the slightly disturbing take that Ponytail would rather die than miss a supernova, hence the fireworks SevenTheGamingKitty (talk) 19:46, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

The combustion number for sucrose is wrong. Heat of combustion is 1350kCal/mole, mass per mole is 342g, so you'd need about 2.5kg of sugar, not 0.6 grams. Dkfenger (talk) 21:11, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

I'm half tempted to mention that it might not be advantageous to go outside and watch a supernova flare up. It shouldn't be a problem, as none of the likely candidates are anywhere near close enough to us, but I'm thinking of the story setup for The Day Of Triffids... "Hey, everyone, look up there, where there'll suddenly be a bright light!" could end up to be not ideal. ;) 81.179.199.253 21:55, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
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