The concept of space is both terrifying and captivating. Our world, much less our tiny towns, means nothing in the grand scheme of the universe. Even our solar system’s Sun is ridiculously small compared to the star 100 times its size out there. Understandably, the death of a star is one of the most catastrophic and violent events that happen in space - they quite literally explode.
Believe it or not, small stars live longer than huge stars. This is because stars die when they use up their nuclear fuel. Bigger stars burn through the fuel more quickly. Luckily, the sun is relatively small, so it most likely won’t blow up for another 5 to 7 billion years according to scientists. There are about 1,000 other things that could wipe us out before that happens. Some stars, known as red dwarfs, are so small that they can live to be over 100 billion years old.
When big stars have no fuel left, the star collapses and its outer lays explode in what’s called a supernova. After that violent explosion, the core of the star is left as a black hole. For average stars, after using up their fuel, they swell to become “red giants” and then shed their outer layers to sometimes create a “planetary nebula.”
Recently, scientists got the opportunity to watch a supernova in real-time. The star, called Betelgeuse, is a red supergiant. While red supergiants are not the biggest stars nor the brightest, they are the largest in terms of volume. About 120 million light-years away and 10 times bigger than our sun, Betelgeuse exploded as a type II supernova. Watching this occurrence has given astronomers more information about a star’s behavior before exploding. They were able to observe the indications of a pre-supernova star as they noticed large amounts of released gas due to unknown internal changes. Furthermore, scientists realized that instead of stars going quiet before exploding like they previously believed, stars collapse inwardly due to the remaining iron being unable to form and then the supernova occurs.
“It's like watching a ticking time bomb. We've never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now,” said UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Astrophysics and Astronomy Raffaella Margutti.
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