collapsing stars..a hypothetical.

Okay I am in a space ship, orbiting a star at say a 100AU. Suddenly my onboard astronomy expert says. "Hey the star is about to collapse, we have to get out of here."

Now the question - is there any practical way that we could predict say with 24 hour accuracy that a star could either nova or supernova.

And is there any class of star that can nova, that does not need to be part of a binary system?

Thanks yet again - Glen

[roidspop]

Solitary supergiants can certainly go supernova...they just need to have evolved far enough.

As to predicting a nova/supernova...I would guess that would depend on developing a very sensitive neutrino detector and a neutrino-emission theory of pre-collapse stellar cores. That detector is pretty hard to imagine...some sort of Unobtanium, but this with maybe 10^10 the neutrino capture cross section of anything we know about. As we said in the sixties, "heavy, Dude".