Can supernovae be predicted before their occurrence? OR are they unpredictable?

Question

Can we predict something like "next month we are going to see a supernova of x*x brightness ....."

Answer 1

  They are unpredictable.

  Until 1987 it was believed that red super giants were the precursors to a super nova until a blue giant exploded a giant star known as sanduliac.

Answer 2

No, supernovae are unpredictable. Plenty of stars have reached a very large size and are still shining, whereas others have turned either nova or supernova while smaller.

Answer 3

No we dont have enough data on super novas due to all the ones weve seen where from other glaxies and not ours however this is good since if one occured here in our galxacy the amont of energy comming from it would wipe us out .  

Answer 4

Yes and no.  On the macro scale we can predict which stars will become supernovae, and we can also estimate when it is going to occur - on a stellar-life  time-scale (that is give or take several million of years).  However, we can not predict it with the precision comparable to human life-span.  So a discovery of a supernova occurs by chance, although we know in which areas of the sky we are more likely to find one.

Answer 5

There is a class of repeating dwarf nova.  They're not predictable in the sense of "we'll see one next Thursday".  But they are predictable in the sense that one may be known to explode every 27 years.  It might be 9 years or 45 years, but there is an expected average, and we are not disappointed by it.  There are people who periodically monitor some of these known objects.

And, as has been mentioned, it is known that a star like the Sun does not have enough mass to explode.  Only bigger stars will do that.

So, in general, no.  We have to look.

Yet supernovas are now found approximately daily.  How is this done?  Well, one group has a modest telescope that looks at thousands of galaxies every night.  The new images are compared with old images for changes by computer.  A list of candidate events is generated, and careful followup observations confirms them (or not).  Most of these galaxies aren't terribly near by.  But the small (30") size of the searching telescope does limit how far away they can be.