Some talks have titles you just can’t pass up. So it was with “How astronomers die,” a presentation by historian Thomas Hockey of the University of Northern Iowa. Hockey exercised tact in not including perhaps the most famous astronomical death of recent decades, when a young researcher named Marc Aaronson was crushed in 1987 by a rotating observatory dome on Kitt Peak in Arizona. Such modern tragedies aside, Hockey clearly relished the gorey details of astronomers biting the dust in eras long past.

Most astronomers, he told his clearly relieved audience, die natural deaths. But others have gone down in flames in the annals of history – literally. Giordano Bruno, after all, was burned at the stake in 1600, though his crime was heresy, not astronomy. The philosopher Boethius, whose writings covered astronomical topics, was executed by having a cord tightened around his forehead so tightly that his eyes “cracked in their sockets,” says Hockey, and then was bludgeoned to death. And the 4th-century mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria (right) suffered a gruesome death at the hands of Christian mob, who pulled her from her chariot and skinned her alive with oyster shells, as some accounts have it.

War has claimed a fair number of promising astronomers — from Archimedes who expired via a Roman sword, to British astronomer William Gascoigne, who died at the battle of Marston Moor in Yorkshire in 1644. Travel has also been “quite a grim reaper,” Hockey noted – taking out astronomers in car crashes, shipwrecks, and even a freak blimp accident. Finally, John James Waterston may have actually given his life for his work – while attempting to precisely measure solar radiant energy, he suffered heatstroke that later brought him regular fits of dizziness and may have contributed to his falling, and drowning, in an Edinburgh canal in 1883.