- 1超新星（天文學正式用語）。注意中文名稱容易誤導：它其實是老恆星死亡時的大爆炸，不是新生的星星。
A supernova is a star exploding — not a small flare, but the star tearing itself apart at the end of its life. For a few weeks it can shine brighter than a whole galaxy, then fade. The plural is supernovae (formal, science writing) or supernovas (both are correct; supernovas is more common in ordinary writing).
This is a real science word, so it keeps its meaning: , documentaries, textbooks. If you use it, you are talking about a star.
People do borrow it as a picture, though, and the picture is a specific one: brilliant, and then gone. A band that becomes hugely famous and breaks up within a year might be called a supernova. Notice that the image includes the ending — if you only mean "very famous", superstar is the word, not supernova.
From the word’s history
From super- + nova, coined by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1931.
super-（超）加 nova（新星），1931 年天文學家所創。
組成super- + nova. super- means "above, beyond" (Latin super); nova is Latin for "new" — astronomers called a suddenly-appearing bright star a nova, a "new star", because it seemed to appear from nowhere. A supernova is a far bigger version of that.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
supernovanoun/ˌsuː.pə(ɹ)ˈnəʊ.və/
- 1
astronomynatural-sciencesA powerful and bright explosion of a massive star, which afterwards becomes a neutron star or a black hole, or is destroyed.
- In these stellar pairings, if the two stars are close together, the white dwarf will siphon mass away from its companion and have an outburst called a nova. And when the white dwarf accumulates too much mass, it will collapse and explode in a supernova. […] “In this kind of supernova, the white dwarf is completely destroyed, so its companion is released and flies off at whatever orbital speed it was originally moving, plus a little bit of a kick from the supernova explosion as well,” Burgasser said.
- 2
Something brilliant.
- Cornelius was the only one dressed in muscle but collectively they were a bully supernova.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。