While I can definitely easily see why this is amusing to people, it’s also indicative of a huge cultural problem in how we educate people about space today: Both adults and children alike exhibit widespread confusion on the dominant state of matter in the universe. “Hyper novas” most likely do not emit gases, for when gases are heated up to a particular temperature, they definitively become ionized. And given some small % of ionization (less than 1% in some cases), the gas becomes a plasma.
99%+ of what we see with our telescopes is matter within the PLASMA state. This is recorded within the introductions of most introductory astrophysics textbooks, but it seems rather plainly that few people ever stop to actually think about what this means. After all, down here on Earth, plasmas are inherently electrodynamic: They exhibit a very low electrical resistance, which permits electrical fields to form within them, and these features are used in numerous consumer-grade devices which we have come to take for granted – like neon lights and fluorescent bulbs. But, the key to realize is plasmas can exist within a dark mode too; in other words, they can exert forces without emitting any light whatsoever.
Yet fewer people appear to realize that there has been a raging debate behind the scenes for more than half a century on how to actually model these cosmic plasmas. And for those who are intensely interested in seeing a resolution to the dark matter problem, these models offer a possible solution to that problem which – with some investigation and investment in theory-making – could materialize into a new paradigm in science.
It would appear rather plainly that the cosmic plasma models which are currently in vogue – the magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) models – are so idealized as to be known to be wrong. Those models preclude any electrodynamic activity whatsoever; your fluorescent light would simply not run on these models.
The story of how this came to be …
http://www.scientificexploration.org/edgescience/edgescience_09.pdf
From there …
“But the critical turn in this story, the part almost never told within the community of astronomers and astrophysicists, is that Alfvén came to realize he had been mistaken. Ironically—and to his credit—Alfvén used the occasion of his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize to plead with scientists to ignore his earlier work. Magnetic fields, he said, are only part of the story. The electric currents that create magnetic fields must not be overlooked, and attempts to model space plasma in the absence of electric currents will set astronomy and astrophysics on a course toward crisis, he said.”
See papers “Why Space Physics Needs to Go Beyond the MHD Box” (Parks, 2004) and “Importance of electric fields in modeling space plasmas” (Parks, 2007).
Sorry to stray from pithy remarks, but it is a sign of the times to see a child repeating such an important misconception …
