The hustle and bustle of daily life is a stark contrast to the tranquility of the night sky.
The stars are the same, year after year. So much so that many of the very names we use for the stars and constellations are thousands of years old. Ancient Greek and Arabic astronomers had almost exactly the same view of the heavens that we have today: the stars do not seem to change.
But this is a lie.
We now know that the night sky is a seething, bubbling tableau. Look up, and unseen by your eye a vast number of stars are erupting, exploding or being torn apart.
How can the universe be so tumultuous, when it seems so peaceful? Because with our limited human vision we see only the tiny brightest tip of what the cosmos has to offer. Look deeper, and violence abounds.
Stars Are Far From Static
A growing number of astronomers now devote their careers to what is known as “time-domain astronomy“—the search for celestial bodies that appear, disappear or change with time. The goal is to catch stars in the very act of brightening or fading, and to use these changes to learn more about the cosmos.
Flashes and flares in the sky usually represent catastrophic releases of energy, under conditions far more extreme than we could ever hope to reproduce in laboratories here on Earth. To see the sky change is to open a window into exotic and fundamental physics that we could never otherwise study.
The catch is that time-domain astronomy is a cosmic guessing game, with seemingly impossible odds stacked against us.
