Word: supernova
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Miller discussed the drawings at his observatory, and visiting Cosmographer Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, England had a bright idea. Maybe, suggested Hoyle, the large object in the drawings is the supernova* of A.D. 1054, the enormously brilliant "new" star that outshone all the other stars in the sky and was plainly visible in daytime. Europe was too backward in astronomy in 1054 to pay much scientific attention to the event, but Chinese and Japanese astronomers recorded it accurately. The supernova appeared over China on the morning of July 4, 1054, and its position was close to the bright star...
...They would trickle down quickly to the center of the star. Falling for great distances under strong gravitational forces, they would release enormous amounts of energy. If enough of them fell at the same time, they would blow the whole star to bits. It would glory briefly as a supernova, shining more brightly than all the stars in the sky. But when the excitement was over, the only thing left would be a "neutron-star": a ball of peculiar matter made largely or entirely of neutrons. A cubic inch of this strange stuff would weigh 18 million tons...
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...