Supernovae are significant to us in one other decidedly central way. Without them we wouldn't be here. You will recall the cosmological conundrum with which we ended the first chapterthat the Big Bang created lots of light gases but no heavy elements...
The reason we can be reasonably confident that such an event won't happen in our corner of the galaxy, Thorstensen said, is that it takes a particular kind of star to make a supernova in the first place. 索尔斯坦森说，有理由相信，这种事...
The question that naturally occurs is What would it be like if a star exploded nearby? Our nearest stellar neighbor, as we have seen, is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 year...
There's something satisfying, I think, Evans said, about the idea of light traveling for millions of years through space and just at the right moment as it reaches Earth someone looks at the right bit of sky and sees it. It just seems right that an e...
Looking for supernovae is mostly a matter of not finding them. From 1980 to 1996 he averaged two discoveries a yearnot a huge payoff for hundreds of nights of peering and peering. Once he found three in fifteen days, but another time he went three ye...
So when a hopeful and softspoken minister got in touch to ask if they had any usable field charts for hunting supernovae, the astronomical community thought he was out of his mind. At the time Evans had a ten-inch telescopea very respectable size for...
Surprisingly little of the universe is visible to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the number of stars you can...
Interestingly, Zwicky had almost no understanding of why any of this would happen. According to Thorne, he did not understand the laws of physics well enough to be able to substantiate his ideas. Zwicky's talent was for big ideas. OthersBaade mostlyw...
On January 15, 1934, the journal Physical Review published a very concise abstract of a presentation that had been conducted by Zwicky and Baade the previous month at Stanford University. 1934年1月15日，《物理学评论》杂志刊登了一篇论...
But Zwicky was also capable of insights of the most startling brilliance. In the early 1930s, he turned his attention to a question that had long troubled astronomers: the appearance in the sky of occasional unexplained points of light, new stars. 然而...
