Bill Bryson - The Reverend Evans's Universe

You will most definitely know that the universe is massive - for example if you look at the night sky you can see over two thousand stars without moving your eyes or head - and I doubt that if you there was one small extra star one night, you would notice it. One man, though, can. And with his 16-inch telescope situated in his crowded little store room off the kitchen. Obviously he can see much more than the naked eye with his telescope, but another thing is that he has speed. A 16-inch telescope is not so large - which means that where a large professional telescope would be lucky to do fifty or sixty, this man can observe about four hundred galaxies an evening!

His name is Reverend Robert Evans.

The extra star I mentioned earlier, is a supernova. This is what Evans hunts for. Supernovae happen when stars bigger than our own sun collapses… And then explodes, instantly releasing the energy of a hundred billion suns. This makes it for a time burn brighter than any other star in its galaxy.

Evans began looking for these supernovae in 1980, about fifty years after the first idea of supernovae was suggested by an almost mad-man obsessed with push-ups named Fritz Zwicky, and by 2003 he had found thirty-six of these stars. That’s a lot. Because, to put it in perspective for you, and this is in Bill Bryson’s words; “imagine a standard dining room table covered in a black table cloth and throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy. Now imagine fifteen hundred more tables like the first one - enough to make a single line two miles long - each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Evans walk among them. At a glance he will spot it. This grain of salt is the supernova.”

Not many people can find them, and sometimes Evans beats machines at it. Reverend Robert Evans is an extraordinary man.

Monique