too brig Evans, aquiet and celescope onto tains of Australia, about fifty miles of Sydney, and does an extraordinary to t and finds dying stars.
Looking into t is of course t. Glance at t sky and s of it—tars not as t as t lefttar, our fait actually last January or in 1854 or at any time since teentury and ne just reac. t it ill burning on te 680 years ago. Stars die all time. Bob Evans does better tried is spot ts of celestial farewell.
By day, Evans is a kindly and noired minister in ting Cralia,eentury religiousmovements. But by nigitan of tssupernovae.
Supernovae occur ar, one mucacularly explodes, releasing in an instant time brigars in its galaxy. “It’s like a trillion once,” says Evans. If a supernova explosion -years of us,o Evans—“it s it.
But t, and supernovae are normally mucoo far ao ,most are so unimaginably distant t t reacestt t distinguisars in t t of space t filled before. It is t sky t the ReverendEvans finds.
to understand tandard dining room table covered in a blacktableclot across it. ttered grains can bet of as a galaxy. Noeen ables like t one—enougofill a al-Mart parking lot, say, or to make a single line t. No to any table and let Bob Evans a glance it. t grain of salt is the supernova.
Evans’s is a talent so exceptional t Oliver Sacks, in An Ant on Mars, devotesa passage to er on autistic savants—quickly adding t “tiont istic.” Evans, Sacks, laug tion t beeitistic or a savant, but o explain quite comes from.
“I just seem to ar fields,” old me, ic look, ranquil edge of t icularly good at otremember names well.”
“Or chen.
o see elescope. I Evans o maneuver. In fact, outside but to a crooreroomoff tcelescope—a is about t-er tank—rests in a . o observe, rips to a smalldeck off tcops of eucalyptustrees groter-box vie is more t too bright, he finds his supernovae.
term supernova rop namedFritz Zzerland, Zo titute of tec once distinguisy and erratic talents. seem to be outstandingly brigtle more tating buffoon.” A fitness buff, en drop to teco demonstrate y to anyone it. oriously aggressive, ually becoming so intimidating t collaborator, a gentle man named alter Baade, refused to be left alone . Onat least one occasion Zened to kill Baade, ilson Observatory, if ech campus.
But Zartling brilliance. In turned tention to a question t roubled astronomers: ts of ligars. Improbably ron—tomic particle t been discovered in England by JamesC be at t of toccurred to if a star collapsed to t of densities found in toms, t ed core. Atoms erally be crusogetrons forced into trons. You ar.
Imagine a million really ill not even close. tron star is so dense t a single spoonfulof matter from it after tar t of energy leftover—enougo make t bang in tant explosionssupernovae. t events in creation.
On January 15, 1934, tract of apresentation t ed by Z StanfordUniversity. Despite its extreme brevity—one paragrapy-four lines—tractcontained an enormous amount of ne provided t reference to supernovaeand to neutron stars; convincingly explained tion; correctly calculatedted supernovaexplosions to tion of a mysterious neionary to say t. Neutron stars be confirmed for ty-four years. tion,t been verified yet. Altogetract ecrop Kip S. t prescient documents in tory of pronomy.”
Interestingly, Zanding of whis would happen.
According to t understand to be able tosubstantiate alent ly—to do tical sweeping up.
Z to recognize t t nearly enougo oget t be some otational influence—ter. One to see if a neutron star s even lig escape its immense gravitationalpull. You ely, Zracted almost no notice. er, tRobert Oppenurned tention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, asingle reference to any of Z doions concerning dark matter attract serious attention for nearly four decades. e can only assume t of pushis period.
Surprisingly little of to us 6,000 stars are visible to t 2,000 can be seenfrom any one spot. itars you can see from a single locationrises to about 50,000, and leaps to 300,000. iteen-incelescope, suco count not in stars but in galaxies. From ensof billions of stars. table numbers, but even o take in,supernovae are extremely rare. A star can burn for billions of years, but it dies just once andquickly, and only a fears explode. Most expire quietly, like a campfire at daypical galaxy, consisting of a ars, a supernova tle bit like standingon tion platform of tate Building elescope and searctan in t us say, someone ligy-first-birthday cake.
So er got in touco ask if ts for ing supernovae, tronomical community t of his mind.
At time Evans en-incelescope—a very respectable size for amateur stargazingbut of to do serious cosmology—and ofind one of tronomical ory before Evansstarted looking in 1980, fey supernovae time I visited of 2001, recorded y-fourty-fifter and a ty-sixtain advantages. Most observers, like most people generally, are int of sky largely to first. elescopes are cumbersome tional time is consumed o position. Evans could sle sixteen-incelescope around like a tail gunner in a dogfigicular point in telescope o do fifty or sixty.
Looking for supernovae is mostly a matter of not finding to 1996 a s of peering andpeering. Once een days, but anotime tfinding any at all.
“tually a certain value in not finding anyt s to te at heabsence of evidenceis evidence.”
On a table beside telescope acks of pos and papers relevant to s,and ronomicalpublications, and at some time you must tos of distant nebulae and t clouds of celestial lig delicate and moving splendor. Evans’s . t blurry black-and-tle points of ness. One ed a sars rifling flare t I o put close to my face to see.
told me, ar in a constellation called Fornax from a galaxy knooastronomy as NGC1365. (NGC stands for Nealogue, o say, it’sa database.) For sixty million silent years, t from tar’s spectacular demise traveledunceasingly til one nig of 2001 it arrived at Eartiniest brig sky. It Evans on-scented ted it.
“tisfying, I t t traveling formillions of years t at t moment as it reac t bit of sky and sees it. It just seems rig an event of t magnitudesnessed.”
Supernovae do muc a sense of ypes (one of ticular, knoant to astronomy because it alical mass. For t can be used as a standard candle to measure te of the universe.
In 1987 Saul Perlmutter at tings out to find a more systematic metter devised a nifty system using sopicated computers andcal cameras. It automated supernovaing. telescopes could noake tures and let a computer detect telltale brigs t marked a supernova explosion. In five years, ecter and Berkeley found forty-teursare finding supernovae elescope attcelevision,” Evans said ouc took all t of it.”
I asked empted to adopt tecoo muc to of est supernova and smiled—“Ican still beat times.”
tion t naturally occurs is “ be like if a star exploded nearby?” Ournearest stellar neigauri, 4.3 lig if to c oft event spreading across tipped from a giant can. be like if co off our bones? ouldpeople still go to crops? ould anyone deliver to tores?
eeks later, back in toions to Joensen, an astronomer at Dartmout travels out at t, but so does tructiveness, so you’d learnabout it and die from it in tant. But don’t ’s not going to happen.”
For t of a supernova explosion to kill you, o be“ridiculously close”—probably en ligypes of radiation—cosmic rays and so on.” tains of spooky lig be a goodtent enougo put on sucospic zone normally protects us fromultraviolet rays and ots. it tospunateenougo step into sunligty quickly take on t us say, anovercooked pizza.
t t suc ensen said, is t it takes a particular kind of star to make a supernova int place. A candidate star must be ten to ty times as massive as our o e size t’s t close. t likely candidate elgeuse, someterestingly unstable is going on t Betelgeuse isfifty t-years away.
Only imes in recorded ory o bevisible to t in 1054 t created tar brigo be seen during trecent ably safe 169,000 light-years away.
Supernovae are significant to us in one otral t be cer—t ted lots of lig no s. ter, but for a very long time nobody could figure out er. t you needed somet—ter even ttest stars—toforge carbon and iron and ts erial. Supernovae provided tion, and it as singular in manner as Fritz Z.
uary in Nature as a “cosmologist and controversialist” and bot certainlyure ’s obituary, “embroiled in controversy for most of his life”
and “put o mucance, and evidence, t tural ory Museum’s treasured fossil of an Arceryx doo tologists, Eart only seeded by life from space but also by many of its diseases, suced at one point t ingnoses rils underneatothem.
It of facetiousness, for a radiobroadcast in 1952. ed out t notanding of pfor , ically begin to expand.
eady-state tantly expanding andcontinually creating neter as it . if stars imploded te s of —100 million degrees or more, enougo begin togenerate ts in a process knos ors, received a Nobel Prize. .
According to ar e enoug to create all ts and spray to terstellar medium as it is kno could eventually coalesce into neems.
it became possible at last to construct plausible scenarios for his:
About 4.6 billion years ago, a great s some 15 billion miles acrossaccumulated in space e. Virtually all of it—99.9percent of tem— to make t of ting materialt over, ted close enougogeto be joined byelectrostatic forces. t of conception for our planet. All over tesolar system, t grains formed larger and larger clumps.
Eventually to be called planetesimals. As tured or split or recombined in endless random permutations,but in every encounter todominate t around wraveled.
It all o groiny cluster of grains to a baby planetsome to aken only a feens of thousands of years.
In just 200 million years, possibly less, tially formed, till moltenand subject to constant bombardment from all t remained floating about.
At t, about 4.5 billion years ago, an object to Eart enougerial to form a companion sp ist, terial self into a single clump, and o t companions us yet. Most of terial, it ist, came from t, not its core, ally, is almost aled as a recent one, butin fact it proposed in t t it is people paying any attention to it.
a ts eventual size, it oform an atmosply of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, metof stuff t e from te of a green, t en a toesomehow life did.
For t 500 million years tinued to be pelted relentlessly bycomets, meteorites, and otic debris, er to fill ts necessary for tion of life. It and yet some going. Some tiny bag of cce. e were on our way.
Four billion years later people began to our story next takes us.
PARt II ture and Nature’s la Ne.
-Alexander Pope