glappkaeft said:
While I agree with your other points this couldn't be more wrong. You don't even need a telescope to split double stars. For instance the naked eye is enough to split the two main components of the quadruple system Mizar and Alcor in the Big Dipper's handle. With a small telescope you can split thousands of double stars.
I admit that I'm not up to date with recent astronomy, but last time I checked, at over one light year apart, Alkor and Mizar form a binary in the same sense(and with similar certainty) that Alpha and Proxima Centauri do.
Still, we can use that example to show age123 why he coudn't possibly see a supernova acting like he saw.
Alkor and Mizar are ~80ly away, and ~1ly apart. They are separated by a 4arcminutes angle on the sky. This is some 3 times under the limit of human eye resolution(1.2 arcmin).
So, at that distance, it is in principle possible to separate two stars orbiting each other at 1/3rd of a light year.
This in turn, is some 10000 times farther than the orbital radius of binary stars that undergo the Ia supernova event age123 is alluding to.
Even if we imagined some mass transfer between the two stars at such a distance, it'd take a larger part of a year, not a few seconds. Otherwise the mass would have to travel faster than light.
Additionally, if a supernova exploded 80ly away from Earth, we'd all be dead, most likely.
But let's say the supernova is ~800ly away, at which distance we'd be pretty safe (although it would be close enough to have a good chance to outshine the Moon), and the binary elements are 6AU apart.
The angular separation between the binary components would now be 4arcmin/10
5 ≈ 0.00024 arcsec
or roughly thirty thousand times beyond human eye resolution capabilities.
Seeing the binary components of a Ia supernova with a naked eye would be similarly impossible as seeing the fine structure of DNA.
So, if somebody told you that they saw something vaguelly like a double helix in their cup of coffee, you would be just as sure as we are that whatever it was, it wasn't DNA.