Word: supernova
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Astronomer Nicholas U. Mayall of Lick Observatory, Calif., was taking routine pictures of N.G.C. 6964, a spiral nebula four million light-years away. On one of the plates last week his practiced eye discovered a monstrous star that should not have been there. It was a supernova, an obscure star that had exploded suddenly. When Dr. Mayall photographed it first, its "absolute brilliance" was equal to two million suns. It had probably faded from a peak a few weeks ago of four million suns. If any planets had been revolving around that unstable star, they were certainly vaporized...
Explosions of supernovae are the most spectacular phenomena in the universe, and among the most mysterious. Fortunately for everybody except impatient astronomers, they do not seem to occur very often. Each star system, such as N.G.C. 6964 and the earth's own Milky Way galaxy, is thought to average one such catastrophe in about 600 years. The brightest local outburst, thought to be a supernova, was Tycho's Star, which exploded in 1572 and was bright enough to be seen in daytime...
...Work Miracles as a nude god riding across the Milky Way. The shooting was done outdoors, at night, in midwinter. So he went to warmer Hollywood, where he made his debut menacing Tyrone Power and the British Empire in Lloyds of London. Lancer Spy was supposed to make a "supernova" of Sanders. "A super-nova," 20th Century-Fox explained, "is what astronomers call a big star which appears suddenly and shines with great brilliance." Instead, Sanders became one of the best scene stealers in the business and one of Hollywood's more sinister personifications of Evil (Man Hunt...
...brilliant exploding star recorded by Chinese stargazers in 1054 A.D. now forms the Crab nebula. "This star shone temporarily ten times brighter than the moon," said Rudolph Minkowski of Mount Wilson Observatory, "and was visible for a full month in the daytime sky. It was . . . one of the three supernovae which have appeared in the Milky Way during the last thousand years. The others were Tycho's star in 1572, and Kepler's Nova of 1604." In Pasadena next day Minkowski's colleague, Walter Baade, announced finding the debris of Kepler's supernova, which...