I’m not exactly certain why the science show Nova chose its name. All it means is “new.”

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I mean there’s a Canadian province called Nova Scotia; “new Scotland.”

Nova isn’t exactly a news show.

What the name Nova has going for it is that it has a particularly sciency feel to it and that’s because it’s the name of a kind of exploding star. What’s so new about something a billion years old?

Since stars are nothing new the question becomes why this kind of star is called “new.”

The reason goes back to a Danish scientist named Tycho Brahe who wrote a report on an exploding star he noticed back in 1572.

Before Brahe saw this exploding star it was a known scientific fact that the earth was at the centre of the universe and the sun and moon and planets orbited around us. Out there beyond those heavenly bodies (flapping about like balloons on strings) there was an enormous sphere into which were embedded all the stars.

The universe was fixed and unchanging just as God had intended it to be.

But that night Brahe noticed something that wasn’t fixed and unchanging. There seemed to be a new star in the heavens.

As was so common in those days scientific progress was in Latin and so his report was called de stella nova meaning “concerning the new star.”

That’s why exploding stars are called nova and supernova, because at the time it was such a shocking idea to think that there might even be a new star in the sky that it got all the scientists talking and consequently stella nova got worn down to just nova.

Tycho Brahe was a careful observer and what he saw convinced him also that this new star had to be much further away than most of the other stars. These observations were some of the nails in the coffin of the we’re-the-centre-of-the-universe theory of astronomy.

Just how careful an observer was Tycho Brahe?

Well, as part of his scientific equipment he had a clock to time when various lights in the sky crossed the meridian. He was worried his clock wasn’t accurate enough, which was true because pendulums hadn’t been invented yet. But in the end it didn’t matter because the universe is a pretty accurate clock itself and he found that he could keep better time by noting the known movements in the sky than he could with any old clock.

Although this chain of events all began back in the late 1500s it took until 1833 before anyone used the word nova to refer to stars in English.

One final note on the center of the universe: in 1964 in Cambridge University a certain Mr. Barnes was a little fed up with a certain Dr. Goodhart thinking pretty highly of himself and so bet him a bottle of wine that it could be proven that he, Dr. Goodhart was not the center of the universe.

Luckily there was a Dr. Stephen Hawking nearby who settled the bet.

But not in the way one might hope.

While people might readily agree that Dr. Goodhart was not the center of the universe there is in fact no way to prove this.