“A billion years ago, something in the whirling darkness of space erupted with a fury that obscured the glow of entire galaxies,” reports Robin Andrews in Quanta after scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced the discovery on August 15th of the most massive star ever known to be destroyed by a supernova explosion, challenging existing models of how massive stars die and providing insight into the death of the first stars in the universe.