t Evans, aquiet and celescope onto tains of Australia, about fifty miles    of Sydney, and does araordinary to t and finds dying stars.

        Looking into t is of course t. Gla 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 sieentury 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 uand    tandard dining room table covered in a blacktableclot across it. ttered grains    bet of as a galaxy. Noeen ables like t one—enougofill a al-Mart parking lot, say, or to make a single li. No to any table a Bob Evans    a gla. 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    es from.

        “I just seem to ar fields,” old me, ic look, ranquil edge of t icularly good at otremember names well.”

        “Or .

        o see elescope. I    Evans o maneuver. In fact,    outside but to a crooreroomoff tcelescope—a    is about t-er tas in a . o observe, rips to a smalldeck off tcops of eucalyptustrees groter-box vie is more t tht, he finds his supernovae.

        term supernova rop namedFritz Zzerland, Zo titute of tece distinguisy aic talents.    seem to be outstandingly brigtle more tating buffoon.” A fitness buff, en drop to teonstrate y to a. oriously aggressive, ually being so intimidating t collaborator, a gentle man named alter Baade, refused to be left alone . Onat least one occasion Zeo kill Baade, ilson Observatory, if ech campus.

        But Zartling brilliance. In turention 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 de a single spoonfulof matter from it    after tar t of energy leftover—enougo make t bang in tant explosionssuper events iion.

        On January 15, 1934, tract of apresentation t ed by Z StanfordUy. Despite its extreme brevity—one paragrapy-four liratained an enormous amount of ne provided t refereo supernovaeand to ron stars; vingly explaiion; correctly calculatedted supernovaexplosions to tion of a mysterious neionary to say t. ron stars    be firmed for ty-four years. tion,t been verified yet. Altogetract ecrop Kip S. t prest dots in tory of pronomy.”

        Iingly, Zanding of whis would happen.

        Acc to t uand to be able tosubstantiate alent ly—to do tical sweeping up.

        Z t nearly enougo oget t be some otational influeer. Oo see    if a ron star s    even lig escape its immense gravitationalpull. You ely, Zracted almost no notice. er, tRobert Oppeention to ron stars in a landmark paper,    asingle refereo any of Z doions ing dark matter attract serious attention for nearly four decades. e    only assume t    of pushis period.

        Surprisingly little of to us    6,000 stars are visible to t 2,000    be seenfrom any one spot. itars you    see from a single locatioo about 50,000, and    leaps to 300,000. iteen-incelescope, suco t not in stars but in galaxies. From ensof billions of stars. table numbers, but even o take in,supernovae are extremely rare. A star    burn for billions of years, but it dies just ondquickly, and only a fears explode. Most expire quietly, like a campfire at daypical galaxy, sisting of a ars, a supernova tle bit like standingon tion platform of tate Building elescope aan in t us say, someone ligy-first-birthday cake.

        Sot in touco ask if ts f superronomical unity t    of his mind.

        At time Evans en-incelescope—a very respectable size for amateur stargazingbut    of to do serious ology—and ofind one of tronomical ory before Evansstarted looking in 1980, fey superime 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 ed 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 blad-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 stellation 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 Earti brig sky. It    Evans oed 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 a of t magnitudesnessed.”

        Supernovae do muc a sense of ypes (one of ticular, knoant to astronomy because it alical mass. For t    be used as a standard dle 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 puters andcal cameras. It automated supernovaing. telescopes could ures a a puter 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 teuc to of est supernova and smiled—“I still beat times.”

        tion t naturally occurs is “    be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our stellar neigauri, 4.3 lig if to c oft event spreading across tipped from a giant .    be like if co     off our bones? ouldpeople still go to    crops? ould anyone deliver to tores?

        eeks later, ba toions to Joensen, an astro 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—ic rays and so on.” tains of spooky lig    be a goodtent enougo put on sucospie    normally protects us fromultraviolet rays and ots. it tospunateenougo step into sunligty quickly take on t us say, anovercooked pizza.

        t t susen said, is t it takes a particular kind of star to make a supernova int place. A didate star must be ten to ty times as massive as our o e size t’s t close. t likely didate 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 tret     ably safe 169,000 light-years away.

        Supernovae are signifit to us iral    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 eve stars—te carbon and iron and ts    erial. Supernovae provided tion, and it as singular in manner as Fritz Z.

        uary in Nature as a “ologist and troversialist” and bot certainlyure ’s obituary, “embroiled in troversy for most of his life”

        and “put o muce, and    evide 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 underhem.

        It    of facetiousness, for a radiobroadcast in 1952. ed out t notanding of pfor , ically begin to expand.

        eady-state tantly expanding andtinually creatier as it .    if stars imploded te s of —100 million degrees or more, enougo begin togee ts in a process knos ors, received a Nobel Prize. .

        Acc to ar e enoug to create all ts and spray to terstellar medium as it is kno could eventually coalesto neems.

        it became possible at last to struct plausible sarios for     his:

        About 4.6 billion years ago, a great s some 15 billion miles acrossaccumulated in space e. Virtually all of it—99.9pert of tem— to make t of ting materialt    over, ted close enougogeto be joined byelectrostatic forces. t of ception for our pla. All over tesolar system, t grains formed larger and larger clumps.

        Eventually to be called plaesimals. As tured or split or rebined in endless random permutations,but in every enter todomi around wraveled.

        It all o groiny cluster of grains to a baby plasome    to aken only a feens of thousands of years.

        In just 200 million years, possibly less, tially formed, till moltenand subject to stant bombardment from all t remained floating about.

        At t, about 4.5 billion years ago, an object to Eart enougerial to form a panion sp ist, terial self into a single clump, and    o t panions us yet. Most of terial, it ist, came from t, not its core, ally, is almost aled as a ret 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, nitrogeof stuff t e    from te    of a green, t en a toesomehow life did.

        For t 500 million years tio be pelted relentlessly byets, meteorites, and otic debris, er to fill ts necessary for tion of life. It    a some going. Some tiny bag of cce. e were on our way.

        Four billion years later people began to our story akes us.

        PARt    II ture and Nature’s la Ne.

        -Alexander Pope
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