Supernovas Begin the Third Evening
Some stars flare up and dim periodically. From afar a star that suddenly flares up may seem to be a new star, a “nova,” because before the star became so bright perhaps it was too dim to see. But a star that flares up brighter than a galaxy is a supernova. A supernova exploded 150 000 years ago in a nearby companion of our galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the light of its flare-up reached us in 1987. Some five or six billion years ago, other supernovas exploded, and dispersed their insides over a great region in space. The material quickly cooled and the light of the star remnants went out. The cooled interiors of the stars were just a dry dust.
A star explodes at the end of the second morning, spreading rich chemical dust in the third evening.
When a hot iron is taken out of the fire and quenched in water, the light disappears with the heat. In a similar way, the extinction of the star remnants and the sudden cooling of their material brought on the third evening. The dust contained the iron that would later be the center of the Earth. The dust also had all the elements found in the crust of the Earth. They provide a rich chemistry, the basis of life.
The galaxy called the “Sombrero” (hat) is in the constellation Hercules. The outer dark band (the “hat brim”) is dust rich in the chemical substances necessary for life.
We cannot photograph the end of our own second morning and the beginning of our own third evening, because the Earth itself is made of material ejected from other stars that exploded long ago. The photograph taken in 1987 of a supernova shows the end of the second morning and the beginning of the third evening for some other planet near some other star.
