Why StarS explode

The stars in the sky seem eternal and unchanging.

But that’s an illusion. Like all Initially, the star fuses hydrogen into helium. Like ash
things, stars are born, live out their lives, in a fire, the helium builds up in the core, but it does
and eventually die, doomed to fade away. Stars not fuse because helium takes a lot more pressure and
like the Sun, which have a relatively low mass, age heat than hydrogen does to fuse. If the star is massive
gracefully and die quietly after billions of years. But enough, though, it can ignite helium fusion in its core.
massive stars, with more than ten or so times the mass The helium fuses into carbon, which then starts to pile
of the Sun, “do not go gently into that good up in the core. In very massive stars this process
night, but instead rage, rage against the repeats again and again, fusing lighter ele-
dying of the light”. They explode in H ments into heavier ones: hydrogen to
a catastrophic detonation, send- He helium, helium to carbon, carbon to
ing their outer layers scream- neon, neon to oxygen, oxygen to
C
ing outwards at a few per- silicon, silicon to iron. The star’s
Ne core starts to look like an onion,
cent of the speed of light:
what astronomers call a
O with layers nested inside one
Si
supernova. another.
Fe
The seeds of a star’s ul- At every step, the process gen-
timate destruction are erates more heat, and the fu-
planted deep in its core, sion goes ever faster. A star may
where its energy is generat- fuse hydrogen into helium for
ed. Stars are giant balls of gas, millions or billions of years, but
and when a gas is compressed it by the time it starts to fuse silicon
heats up. Because stars are so big into iron, it may take mere days. As
they have a lot of gravity, so at iron piles up in the core, the
the core of a star the pressure Near the end of a massive star’s life, the fusion occurs in shells star is headed for disaster.
is intense. This means they around the core, like the layers of an onion.
Why? Because up until iron,
get very hot, hot enough to
all the fusion reactions have
smash together atomic nuclei. And when nuclei col-
produced energy in the form of heat. However, there is
lide, they can stick together in a process called fusion.
not enough heat and pressure to fuse the iron nuclei, so
This process releases a lot of energy (in fact, it’s what
once iron builds up in the core, the star’s source of energy
makes hydrogen bombs explode), which heats up the
shuts off. Worse, the electrons in the core combine with
core. In a stable star like the Sun, the inward crush of
the protons in the iron nuclei to form neutrons - and
gravity is balanced by outward pressure caused by the
the electrons were crucial to give the star support as
heat.
well. When they are removed from the star’s core, things
Already we see that the mass of the star is important: quickly go bad.
it provides the gravity needed to compress the core.
Without a source of support, the core suddenly
The higher the mass of the star, the more the core is
collapses. In a thousandth of a second the tremendous
compressed, and the hotter it can get. Fusion reac-
gravity of the core collapses it down from thousands of
tions depend strongly on temperature; the higher the
kilometers across to a ball of compressed matter just a
temperature, the faster the reaction proceeds. As we’ll
few kilometers in diameter. This is a bit like kicking the
see, this is critical later in the star’s life.

8
legs out from under a table. Just like when Wile E. And what of the core? Like the life of the star itself,
Coyote suddenly realizes he is no longer over solid the fate of the core depends on its mass. In relatively
ground and starts to fall, the outer layers of the star low-mass stars like the Sun, the star never explodes
come rushing down. They slam into the compressed at all. The core is not massive enough to fuse helium,
core at a significant fraction of the speed of light. so helium simply builds up. Or perhaps helium does
fuse, but then the star is
This does two things: it
not massive enough to fuse
sets up a huge rebound,
the resulting carbon. In any
sending the outer lay-
event, the outer layers of
ers of the star back out,
the star are blown off by a
and also releases a vast
solar wind over millions of
number of neutrinos,
years, and the naked core,
subatomic particles that
unable to generate its own
carry away most of the
heat, simply cools and fades
energy of the collapse.
away. A star that consists of
The gas from the outer
this revealed core is called a
layers absorbs only a
white dwarf.
small fraction of these
neutrinos, but that’s still These pictures shows the location of Supernova 1987a before it
If the core is more massive, be-
a lot of energy: it’s like exploded (left), and during the explosion (right) tween 1 and 3 times the Sun’s
lighting a match in a fire- mass then things are different.
works factory. The outer The pressure from the collapse
layers of the star explode upwards, and several so- slams electrons into protons, creating neutrons. The
lar masses of doomed star (containing the elements core shrinks to a size of a few kilometers across, and is
that were produced before the explosion) tear out- comprised almost totally of these neutrons. The col-
wards at speeds of many thousands of kilometers per lapse is halted by the neutrons themselves, which resist
second. the pressure. Not surprisingly, this object is called a
neutron star.
As the star explodes, the expanding gas deep inside
is so hot that it can undergo temporary fusion, creat- And for more massive cores? Even the neutrons cannot
ing elements as heavy as uranium. This, plus other ra- resist the pressure created by more than about 3 times
dioactive elements created in the explosion, dumps the Sun’s mass when it collapses. The core implodes,
even more energy into the gas, causing it to glow. and nothing can stop it. Its gravity increases hugely,
The expanding gas is called a supernova remnant; and anything that gets too close will be drawn in, even
it will expand for hundreds of thousands of years, light. It has become a black hole.
eventually cooling and becoming so thin it merges
This is more than just a guess. By studying supernovae,
with the tenuous gas between the stars. Sometimes
supernova remnants, and oth-
the gas from the remnant
er exotic objects, astronomers
will hit and mix with gas
have discovered all this and
that is forming new stars,
much more. If you want to
seeding it with the heavy
continue reading about this
elements formed in the
and get more information,
explosion. The iron in
check out the Resources list
your blood and the cal-
in Appendix B.
cium in your bones were
formed in the supernova
explosion of a massive
star millions of years be-
fore the formation of the
Earth itself.
The Elephant Trunk Nebula
David De Martin (http://www.skyfactory.org), Digitized Sky Survey