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In the final scene of Gone With the Wind, the chagrined Katie Scarlett O’Hara agonizes over the departure of the dashing Rhett Butler. Scarlett inwardly affirms she will win him back because, “After all … tomorrow is another day.”
Maybe you wake up that way, feeling every morning brings a new day. You don’t know why you have that feeling, but you do. “I wake up every day in a new world,” a friend once bragged to me.
Solomon, that wisest of all men, scribed, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
Perhaps he should have looked farther, as I shall explain.
In the early morning of February 24, 1987, three separate neutrino laboratories reported a “burst” of neutrinos plummeting in from outer space. One laboratory was in Japan, one in Russia, and one on Mount Blanc, high in the Alps. (Neutrinos are electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary particles. They have the tiniest of mass and can travel through millions upon millions of miles of solid lead without the slightest effect.) What was the source of those neutrinos?
Four hours later, Las Campanas, Chile, Ian Shelton and Oscar Duhalde, astronomers, were at their telescope observing a dwarf galaxy on the perimeter of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellan Cloud. They noticed that a star suddenly brightened. What was going on?
Some 14 hours later, New Zealand, astronomer Albert Jones spotted the star taking on increased glow.
That star, now called SN 1987 A, continued to increase in brightness, its luminance greater by the hour. Astronomers turned their telescopes to watch it, to see what might happen. Within days, every professional and amateur observer was focused on that star.
By March, ultraviolet emissions were detected by the satellite Astron, at that time the largest ultraviolet satellite telescope. The light from SN 1987 A was spread across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Over the next several months the star continued to increase in intensity, getting brighter and brighter. By May, the star was visible to the naked eye. (Because of its position in the sky, it was naked-eye observable only in the southern hemisphere.)
NASA sent radio commands to the satellite, Voyager 2, en route to Jupiter, to turn its cameras upon this epochal event.
It was brightest in May.
Over the next several months, the star began to dim. It remained visible to the naked eye for about a year.
It faded into obscurity, but blazoned into history.
Not since the year 1604 had such an event been recorded. 
Shakespeare and Galileo were both 40 years old and Newton was 38 years to the future. A star in the constellation Ophiuchus, in the Milky Way galaxy, brightened so much that it became the brightest star in the sky. For a period of three weeks it was visible in the daytime with the naked eye.
Both those events were supernovas, stars that violently explode. The brilliant light was produced by the exploding star. These stars are so massive that it takes years for the explosion to dissipate. The supernova of 1987 was fascinating, to say the least. Clearly, it interested every scientific mind in the world.
But, what interests me at the moment is not the brightness of the supernova, nor that only two supernovas have occurred in the last 400 years. What interests me, today, is that the supernova of 1987 did not even occur in 1987. No, not by any stretch of the imagination. It occurred in the year 166,000 B.C.
“What?” you say.
Yes. In the year 166,000 BC, the star exploded into a supernova. Bright, intense light was emitted from that explosion. The light spread throughout the universe. But, the star is so far from earth that it took 168,000 years for the light to reach us so that we could “see” the explosion. It was not until 1987 that the first light beams reached us, the beams originally emitted in the year 166,000 BC. (I have rounded numbers to the nearest thousand.)
New events reach us every day from outer space. Events that, until today, no one “under the sun” (in our solar system) has seen. It is no wonder that every day seems new because every day is new. And it is not just supernovas and great events. We have seen only two supernovas in the last 400 years. No, there is more. Every day, new parts of the universe appear to us that never before were visible, because the light from those distant stars is just now reaching us for the first time in the history of the earth. Thus, not only are old stars changing, some going supernova, for example, but new stars are forming and appearing. Some are being formed and some are just so far away that we are seeing them for the first time since the beginning of the Big Bang. New events are on the horizon each moment.
Take heart. There is, indeed, a new day dawning.