Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[nutshaman]

How could an exploding star found light years from where we are stop dinosaurs from giving birth and change the face of planet Earth ?
The pattern of stars in the night sky usually looks the same from night to night and from year to year. But every century or so, a new star appears suddenly one night and then fades back to invisibility over the next few months. Such a star is called a "nova" . As astronomers learned about the true nature of stars, they realized that novae were exploding stars. Some novae were fairly bright--reaching a few hundred thousand times the brightness of the Sun. Other novae were incredibly bright--reaching several billion times the brightness of the Sun! These amazingly bright novae were renamed "super"-novae.