Stargazing Guy

― Bill Bryson, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything

This quote was taken from Chapter 3, of A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, The Reverend Evans’s Universe, which tells us, in Bryson’s usual chummy way about the unassuming Bob Evans, who he describes as a titan of the skies. For the Reverand Evans hunts supernovae.

For:

“… when the skies are clear and the Moon is not too bright, the Reverend Robert Evans, a quiet and cheerful man, lugs a bulky telescope onto the back sun-deck of his home in the Blue Mountains of Australia, about 80 kilometres west of Sydney, and does an extraordinary thing.”

What is your claim to fame? Do you hunt supernovae?

A supernova is the death of a star, of a Sun, somewhere in the depths of the universe, a star and everything in its system of planets, satellites, comets, asteroids and whatever life may have existed.

For a brief instant a supernova is so bright it outshines all the stars in the galaxy.

Our Sun won’t die as a supernova, it is not large enough, the physics and the maths means it will slowly, over billions of years, expand, maybe expel its outer atmosphere and destroy the closest planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars) and shredding the atmospheres of the gas giants, Jupiter and beyond.

For more on the science of nova and supernova click here.

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PS: I love coffee. BuyMeACoffee, leave a message with a date and time and we can share it, remotely, at the same time, and think about the Cosmos.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else, too, because as Adam Smith said, “we naturally desire not only to be loved but to be lovely”.

Remember, hope lives here.

Opening image credit: Webb and Hubble telescopes side-by-side comparisons visual gains. Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3132. Elements of this picture furnished by NASA, ESA, CSA, STSc

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