First off, dont look at the outer wilds discussion on here, just play the game. Second - they didnt say how many letters we need to encode all of the observable supernova in a given year! So 100 billion galaxies, 1 per year per galaxy, we have around 1 billion to encode. Sorry two edits this moring, first one was right. due to math without coffee. 1e9/26^6 is about 3, 1e9/26^7 is less than one. So we might see 'SN2050aaaaaah'!

That's one of my favourite hints in Outer Wilds. You will see a Supernova. Not with a fancy telescope, it's visible to the naked eye, and if you watch the sky you'll see another soon enough. You can see this right at the start, and unlike the random direction of the probe launch you don't need any game lore to, if you're smart enough, put two and two together.

I really feel like this article should also mention the rate of formation of new stars. According to [1] Universe Magazine the James Webb telescope has revealed that more than 3,000 stars are formed every second.

[1] https://universemagazine.com/en/james-webb-comes-closer-to-r...

I think this says less about supernovas and a lot more about how staggeringly, incomprehensibly vast the observable universe it.

Hmm…

So that's cool, but now I'm thinking: the distant galaxies are redshifted and time-dilated in equal proportion, and also more densly packed because the universe was smaller in the past, so I expect the actual rate of supernovas to be significantly smaller than simply multiplying 1/century/galaxy by 1e11 galaxies.

Edit: also I don't know if rate of supernovas changes over history thanks to different steller environments giving the population-1/2/3 generations of stars…