Although we haven't had a supernova explode nearby in a few hundred years, it's just a matter of time before it happens. Astronomers want to be ready. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory is being built in China and should be gathering its first data by the end of 2023. If all goes well, it can detect a burst of neutrinos coming from a core-collapse supernova before we can see the flash of radiation. As the star is imploding, energy piles up inside the star, but the neutrinos can freely escape, arriving seconds earlier than the radiation. It'll have a range of 3,000 light-years for pre-supernova neutrino detections and 1.2 million light-years for post-supernova detection.
The thing about a supernova is that you never know when it might occur. Supernovae are triggered either by a collision with another star or when the interior of a massive star becomes depleted of nuclear fuel and begins a rapid collapse. Neither of these show any major optical changes before the explosion, so we are left to scan the sky in the hopes of catching one in its early stages. But that could soon change.
For the second type of supernova, known as core-collapse supernova, there is an early warning. As the core of the star collapses, the rapid collision of nuclei triggers a tremendous production of both gamma rays and neutrinos. The gamma-ray photons collide strongly with nuclei, which generates much of the pressure that eventually rips the star apart. But the neutrinos only interact weakly with nuclei, so most of them stream out of the star unimpeded.
This means that when a core-collapse supernova occurs, we experience a burst of neutrinos before the star begins to brighten as a supernova. We have seen this happen once before, when neutrino observatories. In that case, this was only realized long after the fact. It actually helped us understand how neutrinos are generated during a supernova, but we couldn’t use it as an early warning system. By the time the neutrino detections were recognized, the supernova had already occurred.
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