This is all well and dandy and can keep the star going for millions or even billions of years.īut you know how you can combine an electron with its anti-particle, called a positron, and release a bunch of pure energy? That energy comes in the form of a gamma ray, a bit of high-energy radiation. This radiation pushes on the surrounding gas, propping it up from gravitational collapse. Inside the cores of giant stars, elements fuse to release energy in the form of radiation. Another potential source of these tremendous explosions may come from the hearts of the stars themselves. While the “ collapsar” model is able to explain some hypernova behavior, it can’t explain it all. Pulling the rug outĪ wider view of a hypernova in action, as imagined by an artist. Those jets would then slam into any dithering ejecta from the initial explosion, reigniting it in a fiery burst and perhaps forming some of the hypernovae that we see in our skies. If that star was rapidly spinning, tons upon uncountable tons of material swirling and flowing into the emergent black hole would whip up forces of electricity and magnetism into a frenzy, creating the right conditions to launch jets of material, blasting away from the black hole at a nearly the speed of light. And in this case, the ultimate source of unstoppable gravity sets in: a black hole is born. In either case, the neutron star folds in on itself, with nothing able to stop gravity from doing what it does best: make things smaller. Other times, for smaller stars, when the conditions are just right, there is enough material and it collapses back onto the newborn neutron star after the initial explosion. But sometimes, when the star is 40 times the mass of the sun or more, that dense ball of neutrons is helpless against the overwhelming crush of gravity, and it doesn’t even get the chance.
Sometimes that remnant core survives, transitioning to a quiet eons-long retirement as a neutron star. But in the star's last moments, its squashed up core converts itself into a ball of almost pure neutrons, which briefly halt its downfall, triggering a big bounce followed by a spectacular explosion - a supernova.
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