Sisters of the Sun

"Sisters of the Sun" is the eighth episode of the American documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

[1] The episode explores the violent cosmic phenomenon of supernovas, which on average occur once per galaxy per century or one billion times per year in the observable universe.

This team included Annie Jump Cannon, who developed the stellar classification system, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who discovered the means to measure the distance from a star to the Earth by its spectra, later used to identify other galaxies in the universe.

Tyson then describes that stars can only be so large, using the example of Eta Carinae which is considered an unstable solar mass that could become a hypernova in the relatively near future.

Marlee Matlin, Academy Award Winner for Best Actress for her performance in the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God, and the only deaf performer to win a Best Actress Oscar, has collaborated with Cosmos executive producer Seth MacFarlane before in Family Guy where she voiced the character of Stella, Peter Griffin's deaf co-worker at Pawtucket Brewery.