Someday you will find me, caught beneath a landslide, in a champagne supernova in the
sky.
An exploding star is known as a supernova, and they really are spectacular to see.
They create as much light as multiple suns, and are sometimes brighter than entire galaxies.
But why do stars explode in the first place?
That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about, right now on life’s biggest questions.
Hello and welcome back to LBQ, I’m charlotte dobre.
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Stars are gigantic burning balls of luminous plasma that are held together by their own
gravity.
A star forms in a nebula from collapsing clouds of interstellar gas and dust.
They can go on to form Stars the size of our sun, huge stars 1 to 3 times the mass of our
sun, Red giants and red supergiant’s.
But stars do not live forever.
Eventually, they reach the end of their lives.
Sometimes, When a star dies, they explode into a huge supernova, shooting out colossal
amounts of energy, light and matter.
The oldest known record of a supernova was from 185 AD.
It was seen by chinese astronomers, who said that it could be seen in the sky for 8 months.
The term supernova was first coined in 1930 by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky, who used
it to describe an explosion they saw in the Andromeda Galaxy.
There were only 7 documented supernovas before telescopes were available in the 17th century.
One of the most famous was the Crab nebula.
The crab nebula was documented by chinese and Korean astronomers, and it is believed
that south western native americans also saw it because they documented it using rock paintings
in New Mexico and Arizona.
The crab nebula was said to be so bright that astronomers could even see it during the day.
Scientists study supernovas because they are extremely instrumental to understanding our
universe and how our universe came to be.
In fact, it was a supernova that showed scientists that our universe is expending.
Not only that, but supernovas are responsible for distributing matter across the universe.
When moby said, we are all made of stars, he wasn’t being poetic.
The elements found in the core of stars are the same elements we can find on earth.
The stuff of stars gets distributed, it forms new stars, planets, and eventually, hopefully,
life.
So what causes a supernova?
There are two ways in which a supernova can happen.
The first has to do with binary star systems.
Binary star systems consist of two stars, that orbit around the same point.
One of the stars in this orbit is a white dwarf, and it literally sucks the life out
of the other star.
The white dwarf steals matter from its companion star, but after a while, the white dwarf accumulates
too much matter.
This causes a nuclear reaction and the star explodes into you guessed it, a supernova.
The second way a supernova can happen is when a star is about to die.
When a star is at the end of its life, there is no more nuclear fuel to burn.
So some of its mass flows into its own core.
This causes the core to be so heavy, it cant handle the gravity, so it collapses.
As a result, The collapsing star implodes, and becomes a supernova.
After a type 2 supernova, whats left is a really dense object known as a neutron star.
They are only a few miles across, but they have as much mass as a star.
A type 2 supernova can only occur if the star is several times more massive than the sun.
Stars that are extremely massive might not actually explode into a supernova, they could
be what creates black holes.
So, the burning question that I know you’re dying to know.
Will our sun ever go supernova?
Not all stars go supernova and our sun as it stands right now does not have enough mass
to go supernova.
It may however become a red giant in a few million years and that will engulf the earth,
and will then cool into a white dwarf.
A supernova can be interpreted as the ultimate metaphor for life.
Yes, they are gigantic explosions that mark the ending of the life of a star, but they
expel particles that go on to create new stars.
Every second of the day, a supernova occurs somewhere in our universe, creating new stars,
new planetary systems, and eventually new life forms.
Supernovas teach us that even in death, there is life.
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