Why is a nearby supernove (far) overdue?

[HuygensPH]

2) VV Cephei - it is clear that the supergiant (now probably fusing helium into carbon in its deep core) will "soon" blow up as a grand supernova, perhaps ejecting its companion back into the cosmos as a single star that had quite a career behind it.

Thanks to: http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/vvcep.html

and

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/garnet.html

[HuygensPH]

3)IK Pegasi - 150 ly - nearest type 1a candidate. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IK_Pegasi

[HuygensPH]

4) Regor (gamma velorum - 840 ly) - Only a few million years old, the visually fainter Wolf-Rayet component is almost certainly in the last stages of preparing to blow up as a supernova.

Thanks to http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/regor.html

[Arcane]

For more than hundreds of years there has no supernova recorded in our neighborhood within (a few 1000) lightyears. till now still nothing will happen. I hope it will happen (very) soon. The crab nebulae M1 was the last supernova in our neighborhood ,and that was in the 14 or the fifteenth century or so ,and that is (far) too long ago. I am still waiting (impatient) for the next spectaculair supernova explosion. I am sure that it will happen within ten or 30 years. And the (possible) supernova in the (far) distant galaxy in the constellation Aries has of course not my interest ,because you can see nothing of it,only if you have a telescope that can see things at the 18th magnitude. Maybe you have such a telescope? I dont have it. Yes a supernova that is in our neighborhood ,that has my great interest. When you can see it by daylight ,and when it shines here at night as bright ,such as the suns magnitude on pluto. Yes THAT!! is what i am waiting for. Not a supernova in a far distant galaxy that is not visible with the naked eye and not even with your and (my) backyard telescope. The only thing is,forget that distant galaxy with the (possible) explosion that is invisible with backyard telescopes and the naked eye. What do you think about my story? Thanks. Denis12.

The current trend in these forums seems to be "Just because". We don't know why and we don't care to speculate. There is no math formulated by known scientists that tells us how we should think about this subject so it is not up for discussion.

It hasn't exploded yet because it isn't supposed to yet? We can ask a million questions as to why it hasn't exploded yet, but we will just end up going around in a circles so no reason to discuss it.

Sorry, just blowing off steam You have a valid question, and I for one would like to know if any are due to explode soon as well. The problem is, this is like valcanos or earthquakes, we know it will happen, but exactly when is up in the air and I don't think we will ever be able to exactly predict things like this. Especialy when it comes to otherworldy things. The time scales are soooooo long that it could happen today or a million years from now.

[AndreasJ]

Holy necromancy batman!

[Robert Carnegie]

Just what part of the probability of independent events do you not understand.
Flip a coin. No matter how many times it comes up heads, the odds of the next flip being tails is still 50/50!

True. But the sky is full of stars getting older. We believe a proportion of them will experience supernova explosion eventually.

I once saw a very discouraging maths problem that proposed that waiting for a public bus service is a Poisson process, so that your expected time to wait doesn't decrease. I think the same logic applies to say that it isn't accurate: there are buses already on the road heading towards you, just as the stars in the sky are heading towards supernova. But on a small scale the Poisson model is applicable. It does also show that long gaps between events are consistent with the model, and then again sometimes three come along almost at once.

(Buses aren't independent in fact: on an urban service where passengers turn up at stops randomly in their own Poisson processes, a bus running late will get passengers who should be on the next bus after, and thereby that bus will be slowed down, and the bus behind will be lighter and speeded up. But that doesn't add up to three - well, that may be exaggeration.)

[Hornblower]

Alright, I'll see what I can do <starts gesticulting madly in the general direction of Orion>.

I will go outside, aim my horn at Betelgeuse or Antares, and play Siegfried's call as loud as I can. Maybe that will help, if the neighbors and maybe the police don't shush me first.