Hi Jim, lets build a scale model of our solar system. Yeah I know you hate models but this model often surprises people in pubs. The sun is a billiard ball, where is mercury? Just about everyone points a finger almost touching the billiard ball. Mercury would be two metres away from the ball. The Earth seven metres. Jupiter would be forty metres, and pluto three hundred metres. The nearest star would be two thousand kilometres distant.
So, lets have our billiard ball go supernova. If I knew that billions of tonnes of hydrogen was about to hit me, travelling at thousands of kilometres per second, i dont think i would bother getting out of bed. It would simply vaporise the inner planets. Jupiter and Saturn would gravitationally respond to the suns centre of gravity, at first. However, once they were inside of the explosion envelope, most of the mass of the sun having past them at a great lick, they would flick away like a stone from a sling shot.
Past about twenty a.u. the gravitational influence of the explosion wall cannot compete with the influence of what remains of the sun. Orbits will alter but they will still be orbits of the parent body. It would be wrong to think that the wall is now fairly tolerable, it would still destroy Neptune and pluto, though there might be a few rocks left from Neptune.
I suppose we could do the sums to see whether the dirty snowballs that make up the Oort belt would survive, that might while away a pleasant hour. Barbarossa would survive and stay in orbit.
Again though, this cannot happen to our sun. Its a moot point about stars that become type one supernova. Do they have planetary systems? Is our solar system the result of being part of a failed binary system? We have about two hundred solar systems on record at the moment. They all seem to have gas giants close in to their suns. We need a new telescope in space to try and find terrestrial type planets.
Type two supernova must play their part in Joes ideas but not so much as to throw any of his calculations out of whack. Supernova in stellar nurseries will initiate star formation through the dust clouds and deliver stores of heavier elements. They cannot deliver chunks of planets, because they havent had time to build them.
