Well it has been awhile since a proper post. The combination of thesis writing, German learning, financial planning, occasional exercising, and managing immigration beauracracy hasn't left much time for blogging. I came across this today, and found it to be very interesting. Physicists recently described the largest supernova ever observed. Ok, actually, on the surface this is not so exciting. I mean, how can I be excited when I barely understand what a supernova is? Well, what I do know is that stars explode at the end of their life cycles in dramatic, powerful events dubbed supernovas. Normally, the amounts of energy emitted in such events are indescribable to normal, non-physicist minds. For example, a supernova may emit energy which is equivalent to a hundred billion hydrogen bombs or it may emit that equivalent to a hundred trillion H-bombs. Yeah, I get it, they're powerful beyond imagination. However, this article gave a rather innovative example of how powerful this particular explosion actually was. There is a star relatively nearby (7,500 light years, i.e. traveling at the speed of light, we would need 7,500 years to get there) with properties similar to this recently-described, huge supernova. If it were to explode in a similar fashion, the earth would be bathed in near perpetual light. As the article states, we could read comfortably in the middle of the night. The idea of a star exploding in a distant solar system giving the earth constant daylight, is pretty mind-blowing. Makes ya feel kinda small doesn't it?