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NARRATOR: There's a killer lurking in our galaxy,

a star ready to explode

into a supernova.

These are the most visually stunning events in the universe.

Seen from Earth, it would have a terrible beauty,

but, for us, it could be fatal.

In a few seconds, it can release as much energy

as the Sun will over its entire lifetime.

We're trying to hunt it down, but it's lying low.

We haven't seen a supernova in the Milky Way in over 400 years.

It could be anywhere.

It is nearly impossible to predict where and when

the next supernova will happen.

The hunt is on to find the next supernova,

before it finds us.

October, 2019.

One of the brightest stars in the sky

looks dangerously unstable.

If you look at the constellation of Orion,

one of the shoulders of Orion is a star

that is obviously red.

This is Betelgeuse.

I could go into my backyard and see it.

You could clearly see that it was getting dimmer.

Is this a warning?

Is Betelgeuse about to die

in a massive cosmic explosion?

A supernova?

We've been studying this star for hundreds of years,

and one thing we're sure about is that it's big.

Very big.

Betelgeuse is a massive star,

maybe 15 or 20 times the mass of our Sun,

and it's near the end of its life.

It is a massive, enormous, luminous star,

and one day, it's gonna go boom.

Betelgeuse is on our list of supernova candidates

because of this massive size.

The bigger star they are, actually, the shorter the lifespan.

The lifespan of a star depends on a delicate balance

between two competing forces,

gravity pulling in,

and heat and pressure pushing out.

Stars exist because they're held up.

They're not held up by pillars,

they're held up by energy flowing out of the core

toward the surface of the star.

That stops the gravitational contraction.

Stars get their energy from nuclear fusion reactions

right in the core, and the most basic one

is taking two hydrogen atoms

and slamming them together to form a helium atom.

And you might think, "OK, the more hydrogen you have, the more stuff you have,

maybe the longer the star will live."

Turns out it's exactly opposite.

The reason? Gravity.

The more mass a star has, the stronger its gravity.

Gravity that crushes its hydrogen atoms

closer together.

As you crush things more and more,

the temperature gets hotter and hotter and hotter,

and the nuclear fusion reactions burn faster.

So, bigger stars burn their fuel

very, very quickly and live short lives.

Smaller stars burn their fuel much more slowly

and live long, protracted lives.

So when you are a big star, you live fast and you die young.

Betelgeuse burns brighter than 125,000 suns.

But now, it's running out of its hydrogen fuel.

So, it's burning

whatever it has left just to stay alive.

Stars are basically factories

for burning hydrogen into helium.

And then, once the helium is burned,

they start burning heavier and heavier elements,

like, carbon and nitrogen and oxygen.

It's a little like, you burn something, you get ash,

but then, if you crush the ash enough,

you could burn it again,

and then, you crush it some more, and you can burn it yet again.

But this process can't go on forever.

As the size of the atomic nuclei

being fused together grows,

the amount of energy released falls.

The fuel the star needs to resist the pull of gravity

is running out.

Unfortunately, the amount of energy you can extract

by putting two nuclei together,

gets smaller and smaller,

the bigger the nuclei are,

until you come to making iron.

And iron, it turns out,

is the last thing you can make that way.

The problem with iron is, when you fuse it,

it doesn't make energy, it takes it away.

So when the start builds up that iron core,

it's doomed.

It can no longer create energy

in its core to flow out toward the surface

strong enough to keep it from collapsing.

So, collapse is what they do.

In a fraction of a second,

the star's core collapses down from the size of a planet,

to about the size of a small city.

And when that happens, all hell breaks loose.

A huge amount of energy is suddenly released

which forces the collapsing layers back out.

The result? An enormous explosion

we call a supernova.

The shock wave from a supernova

rips out at thousands of miles per second,

and for a brief period of time,

they're brighter than an entire galaxy.

A supernova could devastate life on Earth.

And the evidence can be found

at the bottom of our oceans.

There are layers and layers of silt that have built up,

and there seemed to be a layer,

about 2.6 million years ago

that was enriched in a very strange chemical element,

something called iron-60.

Iron-60 is a radioactive isotope of iron,

and it doesn't last very long, just a few million years.

And the only place that we know of that can make iron-60

is a supernova in an exploding star.

That means, there must have been a supernova

close enough to the Earth

within the past couple of million years

to have physically deposited material on our planet.

That freaks me out.

The sign of this shocking assault on our planet

is a thin layer of this very rare type of iron.

We find it in the mud of every ocean floor

and always at the same depth.

This interstellar dust must have drenched our world

in one enormous burst,

2.6 million years ago.

It was a terrible time.

A third of large animal species in the sea suddenly died out.

There were some pretty amazing fish.

Probably, the most amazing is the Megalodon,

the giant shark, teeth, the size of dinner plates and so on.

But they went extinct 2.6 million years ago

at the end of the Pliocene.

What happened?

A lot of sea creatures died,

and a lot of them were in shallow waters,

whereas deep water animals tended to survive.

That sounds, kind of, like a supernova

that can do things that would affect our atmosphere,

would affect shallow water, but not deeper water.

Supernovas create huge amounts of cosmic rays.

When they crash into other atoms,

they break up and produce

showers of dangerous shrapnel called muons.

These charged particles are similar to electrons,

only 200 times heavier.

So they penetrate more deeply

and cause more damage.

They can pierce through our atmosphere,

pierce through our skin,

get into a cell and disrupt the DNA.

They'll go right through a mouse,

but deposit in the body of a larger animal.

So the impact on an animal the size of a Megalodon,

say, could be pretty extreme.

Muons can shatter DNA,

causing mutations and cancer.

But their power weakens as they travel through water,

which may be why only deep sea creatures survived.

The extinction really tells us that we're not separate

and apart from the universe and the goings-on up there, right?

Supernova going off and things like that,

"OK, it's a pretty light show."

No. It's a direct impact to life on Earth and us.

So are we in danger of extinction?

Is Betelgeuse about to explode?

When stars explode as supernovas,

they can devastate planets hundreds of light years away.

Betelgeuse is about 550 light years from Earth.

So, when it dramatically dimmed in 2019,

scientists were concerned.

But Betelgeuse has dimmed before.

Betelgeuse varies quite a lot over the years.

There are some cycles,

and sometimes, these cycles come together

and you get a deep minimum.

So dimming is part of the star's natural cycle

as it nears the end of its life.

But to get a full picture, we took Betelgeuse's temperature.

If the star was dimming, that would mean

that the surface was cooling over time.

We measured the temperature of Betelgeuse and found out that wasn't happening.

It hardly cooled at all. It cooled, like, 50 or 100 degrees.

You might expect a much, much more dramatic change

in the surface temperature if it were about to explode.

So, if Betelgeuse wasn't cooling much,

what was making it dim?

To take a closer look, we used the Very Large Telescope,

and an exoplanet hunting instrument called SPHERE,

and came up with an extraordinary image.

When I first saw this image of Betelgeuse,

it blew me away, I almost gasped.

I may have said a word I can't say on TV.

That was very exciting.

The image reveals that while the upper part

of Betelgeuse was still bright,

the lower part was noticeably dimmer.

We had images of Betelgeuse from before,

and we were able to compare the new ones with it.

And so you could see that half of Betelgeuse

looked pretty much the same,

but the other half was significantly dimmer.

And what could make a star dim that quickly?

And remember how big this star is.

Nothing happens on Betelgeuse quickly.

So this must be something happening right on the surface.

As heavier material, like silicon,

emerges from the surface of Betelgeuse,

it cools and condenses.

It's like stickin' the hose in the wrong end of your vacuum cleaner.

Instead of pullin' stuff in, it blows all this dust out into space.

Betelgeuse has cosmic indigestion

and is belching dust,

which makes the star seem dim.

But it's not over.

All through 2020,

Betelgeuse first brightened and then, dimmed again.

So astronomers are watching this massive star

with baited breath.

It's gonna explode. The question is, when?

It's probably sometime in the next 100,000 years,

but it could be tomorrow, it could have already exploded

and we're just waiting to see the light.

With luck, if Betelgeuse blows,

all we'll see is a beautiful light show.

But is there another star we should worry about?

A closer star, just 150 light years from Earth

could do us some major damage.

A star like IK Pegasi.

But it isn't this star

which we can see in our night sky that's the threat.

The main star is only about 1.6 times the mass of the Sun.

That's nowhere near enough mass to go supernova.

And yet, we think

it is the progenitor for a supernova.

How can that be?

The main star isn't alone.

It has a more dangerous accomplice.

There's another star there, orbiting the larger star.

And this is what we call a binary system.

Two stars orbiting each other.

Right now, the system is stable, but things aren't always gonna be

the way they are now, and sometime in the future,

things are going to change a lot.

IK Pegasi is really made up of IK Pegasi A,

a large white star,

and its accomplice,

a white dwarf called IK Pegasi B.

This tiny star is the real threat to Earth.

You can think of a white dwarf as a zombie.

You know, it's a dead star,

and they can eat living stars.

If there's a normal star like, the Sun near a white dwarf,

the white dwarf has very, very intense gravity.

It can literally pull material off that normal star

and that material will then pile up on the surface of the white dwarf.

So, it really is eating a living star.

These stars orbit each other

just 18.5 million miles apart.

That's closer than Mercury is to our Sun.

But they're not interacting with each other...yet.

The problem is, sometime in the future

that normal star is gonna run out of fuel,

and when it does, it's going to expand into a red giant.

When it gets to the end of its life,

IK Pegasi A will cool and swell up

to become a red giant.

And that's it. No big explosion.

It won't become a supernova.

But that's just when it's accomplice

IK Pegasi B will start to feed.

A lot of that material will gravitationally be attracted

to the white dwarf and fall onto the surface.

As the white dwarf pulls material

from its bloated red giant neighbour,

it gets more and more massive.

It's gravitational pull increases

so it feeds even faster.

The thing about a white dwarf is that on its surface,

the gravity can be 100,000 times

the gravity of Earth.

So, it's very intense.

The material from the star is mostly hydrogen,

and this can pile up on the surface,

and it's getting squeezed very hard.

But that's how you fuse hydrogen,

that's how you make a hydrogen bomb.

It reaches an incredible temperature.

36 million degrees.

It can actually become hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion reactions.

But right on the surface of the white dwarf,

you get this bright flash.

A nova.

A nova is a big explosion,

but not big enough to destroy the white dwarf.

So, once things calm down,

the white dwarf starts feeding again until there's another nova.

And another, and another.

Each time, the white dwarf gets heavier.

Eventually, it can no longer support its own weight.

The core of a star is actually very dense.

In fact, if you had, like, a teaspoon of material,

it would weigh about as much as an 18-wheel truck.

And it's basically right at the limit of normal matter

being able to hold up at that density.

You dump more and more stuff onto it,

and eventually, there's a limit that's reached.

And it either collapses or, more generally, blows up.

When this happens, IK Pegasi will be brighter

than the full moon in our sky,

because it's only 150 light years away.

Having a supernova 150 light years

sounds like a bad idea, and it is.

That's close enough that it might have

some physical effects on the Earth.

Right now, IK Pegasi is about as far from Earth

as the supernova suspected of killing off the Megalodon.

So, how worried should we be?

The good news is, the IK-Peg system

is moving away from the Sun

and the Earth right now at a decent clip.

So if it's not going to blow up for a while,

that means, it could be on the other side of the galaxy

by the time it does.

By that time, we'll be completely safe.

In our hunt for the next supernova,

our leading suspects are massive stars.

And they don't come much bigger than P Cygni.

It's about 30 times the mass of our Sun.

Double the mass of Betelgeuse.

So big, we don't call it a giant or even a super-giant.

It's a hyper-giant.

And it's behaving suspiciously.

It was first spotted back in 1600,

but just a couple of decades after that it disappeared.

And then, reappeared again, and then, disappeared again,

and then, like, 100 years later, re-appeared.

P Cygni is a luminous blue variable,

the rarest kind of stars in the universe.

This star is so unusual,

we think, because the core is producing

an enormous amount of energy

that's right on the tipping point

of being able to rip apart the stars itself.

Stellar adolescence, like P Cygni, are erratic.

They burn fiercely, and they die young.

They have some of the shortest lives of any star,

just a few million years,

which is why we see so few of them.

It looks like,

P Cygni is going to go supernova any day now.

And for all we know, it could blow up tonight.

At a distance of 550 light years,

P Cygni is too far to threaten Earth.

But we could learn a lot from it

if only we could spot any signs

that it's about to blow up.

As an astronomer, and an astronomer

who has studied supernovas professionally,

havin' 'em far away is fine with me.

Close enough that we can study them well,

but not so close that I can study them personally

on a physical level on my own body.

Yeah, no.

A close supernova would be devastating for life on Earth.

Will there be any warning signs...

..before one of our prime suspects is about to blow?

To find a supernova warning signal,

we need to know what's happening

deep inside the core of an exploding star.

At the very beginning of a supernova explosion,

the core of a massive star is collapsing.

There's no more nuclear fusion going on,

and it is compressing to higher and higher densities.

The star's gravity crushes protons

and electrons so close together,

they merge to form neutrons.

The star's core becomes

one of the densest materials in the universe.

It's like a gigantic atomic nucleus.

Roughly half a million Earths

compressed into the volume the size of a city.

That's really, really dense stuff.

If you had about a teaspoon full of material,

that would be about as much mass as Mount Everest.

Forcing protons and electrons together

releases a huge amount of energy

in the form of tiny, illusive

sub-atomic particles called neutrinos.

Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe. But they don't interact with things

very much at all.

Neutrinos are often called ghost particles

because they do what ghosts do.

They walk through walls.

But neutrinos walk through us, they walk through the planet,

they walk through stars.

They're super-ghosts.

At first, these neutrinos can fly

straight out of the core of the star.

But as the star collapses,

it gets so dense that some neutrinos get trapped

and their energy turned into heat.

And that creates a shockwave that rips the star apart,

and the ensuing explosion is brighter

than billions of stars all put together.

This light show may be spectacular,

but it's only 1% of the energy released in a supernova.

The rest is in the form of a massive burst of neutrinos.

So, neutrinos could act

as a SuperNova Early Warning System.

At least, that's the idea.

On February 24th, 1987,

that idea was tested.

An astronomer was doing a routine survey

of a dwarf galaxy close to ours.

He was taking pictures of it. Develops the pictures and says,

"Hey, there's a star here that wasn't there yesterday."

He basically got up, walked outside and looked and went,

"Oh, there's that star."

And it turns out he had discovered a supernova.

Because it was the first supernova spotted that year,

it was called Supernova 1987A.

- 1987 - A was an amazing event in the world of astronomy.

Essentially, a supernova went off in our own backyard.

It was very close to us,

occurring in a neighbour galaxy of the Milky Way,

and so, it was the brightest thing

seen in our skies since the invention of the telescope.

Supernova 1987A

blazed with the power of a hundred million suns.

But that wasn't the most exciting part.

For the first time, we received an early warning

that a supernova was about to appear

three hours before it lit up our night sky.

Neutrino observatories around the world

saw a sudden surge in neutrinos

from the same direction on the sky.

Neutrinos' ability to zip across the galaxy,

slipping through stars and planets like ghosts,

gives them an unbeatable head start during a supernova.

The neutrinos are released

in the very earliest moments of the supernova blast

and they slip through the atmosphere of the star

before it goes boom.

Neutrinos can escape in as little as ten seconds.

But it can take hours for the shockwave

to travel right through the star

and blast off the outer layers, revealing the light.

The result is that we see neutrinos from a supernova explosion

before we see the actual light.

So if we wanna spot the next supernova explosion,

we've gotta be paying attention to the neutrinos.

Astronomers set up the SuperNova Early Warning System,

a network of neutrino detectors all around the world.

It should give astronomers several hours' notice

of an impending supernova.

But, so far, nothing.

No supernovas have occurred near enough

for the system to detect.

Neutrinos are like the friend that never comes.

We're sitting here waiting for him,

but we don't know when it's gonna actually happen.

Our hunt for the Milky Way's next supernova

has identified some potential suspects.

Very massive, lonely stars,

and stars with smaller sidekicks.

In 2018, astronomers found a system called Apep

8,000 light years away

with two very massive stars.

Each one about as massive as Betelgeuse.

These are giant stars

nearing the end of their lives

with massive outer layers of gas

that continually contract

and heat up again and again.

They become really huge

and bloated and swollen,

and they're prone to huge outbursts.

These unstable stars are called Wolf-Rayet stars.

They're very rare and so hot and bright,

they emit more radiation than a million Sun-like stars.

This intense energy is blasting

their outer layers off into space.

Mass loss has been occurring from the star

so much so that you've actually lost

all the hydrogen

that wasn't burned into helium.

So now, you have a star that's made

entirely of helium and heavier elements.

With no hydrogen left,

these massive stars are running low on usable fuel.

They're like ticking time bombs.

Made even more dangerous

because they're spinning so fast.

It's spinning so quickly,

it's on the verge of ripping itself apart.

And this means that when this thing blows,

it's gonna blow hard.

When a star goes supernova, it's core collapses.

The smaller it gets, the faster it spins.

Some cores collapse into fast-spinning neutron stars.

Heavier ones, like Apep,

collapse into even denser

and more mysterious objects.

Black holes.

The immense gravity within Apep's collapsing core

will drag back some of the gas and dust into a spinning disc.

As the material falls onto the core,

it compresses and it speeds up.

The dying star spins faster and faster as it collapses.

And this incredible rotation

drives the creation of massive magnetic fields

that are capable of funnelling material

around and up and out

in the form of huge beams of radiation.

So the energy from the supernova collapse,

instead of being emitted spherically in every direction,

comes at us in a tightly focused beam.

Like a laser from the Death Star,

it is pointed in one direction.

This is a gamma ray burst.

It is the single scariest thing the universe has to offer.

This is an explosion so powerful

that in a few seconds or minutes

it can release as much energy

as the Sun will over its entire lifetime.

You do not want to get caught in a gamma ray burst.

Let's just put it that way.

The impact of a nearby gamma ray burst

on our home planet is almost too terrible to think about.

It would be a very bad day for Earth.

Earth's atmosphere could be partly blown away

and there could be chemical reactions in the atmosphere

that would form all kinds of noxious products.

A gamma ray burst from Apep might last only ten seconds,

but its impact would last for decades.

The generation of nitrogen oxide

from a gamma ray burst would be disastrous.

In the upper atmosphere, it would eat away our ozone layer,

in the lower atmosphere, it would come out as acid rain.

And the acid rain would destroy our crops.

Nitrogen dioxide also filters out sunlight,

turning the skies dark

and cooling the Earth enough to trigger a new ice age.

Any life on the land, in the shallow parts of the sea

or that live near the sea surface would be done.

In fact, it would ultimately result in extinction.

Blasted by ultraviolet radiation from our Sun,

freezing cold and hungry,

humanity's future would be bleak.

So we really need to know,

when Apep goes supernova

and produces its deadly beam of gamma rays...

..are we in its line of fire?

The good news is that we are probably

not right in the direct firing line of Apep.

The axis of rotation of the Apep system

is pointed 30 degrees away from us.

So if it does blow, it's likely that the jets are going to miss us.

Makes me feel better that this gamma ray burst

isn't pointing at us, but, of course,

there are many other cosmic catastrophes

potentially waiting to get us.

Apep is on the edge of an enormous explosion.

It's huge gravity and incredible spin should produce

a spectacular supernova.

But what if some stars...

..are too big to blow?

Galaxy NGC 6946.

A local galaxy, just 20 million light years away

and well known to supernova detectives.

It's the Fireworks Galaxy because it has produced

so many supernovas in the past century.

And they noticed that one star that they thought

would become a supernova, instead blinked out.

The star under investigation

is N6946-BH1,

a cosmic heavyweight,

25 times the mass of our Sun.

That's way more than the eight solar masses

we thought guaranteed a supernova.

This is a very massive, very luminous star.

The prototype of what you expect

to explode as a supernova.

And over the last couple of years, its brightness has been changing.

Maybe the star was beginning to go a bit unstable.

But then, right in front of our eyes,

this star just completely disappeared.

This is a huge mystery.

Why didn't this thing blow up?

How can a star just disappear?

There had to be something left behind.

So astronomers began a search for evidence,

and found a crucial clue.

When you look in the infrared you can still see some light there.

So there was something happening there. But what?

We think the infrared light is heat

coming off the debris of the dead star.

Something is pulling it inwards.

Something powerful, but also invisible.

A black hole.

The outer stuff from the star is still falling

onto that black hole, and it's powering a little bit of light,

a little bit of the infrared light still gets out.

How can a giant star become a black hole

without exploding into a supernova first?

The answer lies in how dying stars burn their fuel.

For stars that are about, say, 20 times the mass of the Sun,

you're actually gonna burn things convectively.

That means, the gases inside the core are moving around.

A good analogy is water in a boiling pot of water.

You've got your potatoes up here, you're trying to boil them,

you've got convective cells of water that are heated,

bring the heat up to top,

get the potatoes hot and then, those blobs of water cool down,

become denser and settle down to the bottom again

where they're heated once more.

As fusion turns hydrogen to helium

and then to carbon, convection mixes the carbon

so it burns up.

Convection cells work inside of a star

like massive elevators

that take hot gas from the central regions,

bring it up to the surface,

allow it to cool and then, pull that material back down.

They're constantly churning, back and forth inside of a star.

But stars more massive than roughly 20 times the mass of the Sun,

like N6946-BH1,

don't burn carbon this way.

Instead of mixing, the heavier atoms created by the fusion reactions

just start to pile up.

That means, there's a layer of very dense material

building up on just the surface of the core.

All of this stuff is just ready to collapse.

It's possible that if you have enough mass sitting around,

the collapse is so powerful

that it actually collapses into a black hole

before any supernova goes off.

That then is a failed supernova.

It's a star that pretty much directly collapses

to form a black hole.

If many of the massive stars

we expect to go supernova won't,

that's a problem.

We used to think we had the basics of supernovas cracked.

Anytime you have a star more massive than eight times the mass of the Sun,

it was destined to explode as a supernova.

And then, along comes a star that screws everything up.

To make things worse, we found no clear distinction

between stars that go out with a bang

and those that don't.

As many as 30% of massive stars

could die without exploding.

Our search for the next killer supernova

is getting even harder.

Stars blow up when we don't expect them to.

They don't blow up when we expect them to.

They can have several stars orbiting each other,

and the one that blows up isn't necessarily the one you think it will.

So right now, we can't identify a prime suspect,

but the hunt continues.

As far as we know, there are no life-threatening stars out there,

but we haven't done a complete survey.

So, please keep funding astronomy so we can keep looking.

Supernovas are spectacular...

..devastating,

and frightening.

But without them, we wouldn't exist.

The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones

was literally forged inside of a star

that exploded billions of years ago as a supernova.

And I think this is one of the most beautiful

and the most profound things that we've learned in astronomy,

that we're literally, viscerally connected to the cosmos

and the cosmos is connected to us.

With every breath, we are inhaling oxygen

that was created in a supernova explosion.

This is almost literally a cosmic cycle of life.

And a supernova may even be responsible

for the dawning of our intelligence

by causing lightning.

It might sound rather incredible, but a supernova might actually

influence directly weather right here on the Earth.

The cosmic rays from a supernova

will create charges in the lower atmosphere.

That energy will break apart molecules,

excite atoms and molecules, and it will ionize them.

And an ionised atmosphere means that

now, it can conduct electricity.

So it will, probably, increase lightning across the planet.

It's possible the same gamma ray burst

that caused a mass extinction 2.6 million years ago,

also affected Earth's atmosphere,

triggering tremendous bursts of lightning

which caused...forest fires.

We have evidence of widespread fires at this time.

So, it could be that lightning was increased

and that created more fires, and those fires could have levelled

forests and savannahs creating grasslands.

So how could this change boost our intelligence?

With their forest homes burnt,

our ancestors, early hominids,

had to adapt to life out in the open,

which meant, standing up.

You've living in a savannah where there's lions

and leopards and cheetahs.

The savannah is mostly grassland.

It's a lot more efficient, perhaps on two feet.

You can run, and moving on two feet

might have been the survival mechanism.

Standing upright also triggered

the most important change in our history.

Walking around on two feet freed our hands

to be able to start doing things.

And you can imagine, as you start doing things, it drives your brain

to more complexity as you try to figure out how to manipulate things.

And this is perhaps the biggest evolutionary leap,

because without it, we don't get tool use,

we don't get fire, we don't get intelligence.

As our ancient ancestors adapted to their new habitat,

they took their first steps toward world domination.

At least, that's the theory.

The idea presented here is, this would be the dawn

of modern humans as we see it,

and we would owe that to lightning created from a gamma ray burst.

That's nuts.

Supernovas are extraordinary.

They launched our journey into the cosmos,

and, in time, a supernova may end it.

We're searching hard to spot which one it could be.

But for now, the only way we'll know for sure

is when it lights up our sky.

While a supernova might appear to be the death of a star,

the beauty of it is that it's really a story about beginnings as well.

Supernova giveth and they taketh away.

Without supernovae the Earth wouldn't exist

and we wouldn't exist.

I actually do imagine standing out on a nice winter night

looking up at Betelgeuse

and actually seeing the thing explode.

There would be this bright light.

I could imagine my face lighting up,

I would really lose it.

I would love to see a supernova up-close.

I mean, what a light show.

But there's no way I would wanna be that close cos I don't wanna die.

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