Deep underground, a telescope may soon detect ghosts of stars that died before Earth existed

Imagine looking up at the night sky and seeing a star suddenly burst into a blaze of light brighter than anything nearby. A flash so bright that it briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading forever.

This violent fate is rare: fewer than about 1% of stars are big enough to end their lives this way. Indeed, these dramatic explosions only occur in so-called “massive stars”. These are stars with a mass roughly eight times or more that of the Sun.

But these cosmic explosions...