Supernovae are among the most powerful explosions in the Universe, releasing more energy in an instant than most stars will release in their entire lifetime.

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Team: Fraser Caïn – @fcain
Chad Weber – [email protected]

Created by: Fraser Cain and Jason Harmer

Edited by: Chad Weber

Music: Left Spine Down – “X-Ray”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v4tcoZNrSveE&featureyoutu.be

There are a few places in the Universe that defy belief. And supernovae must be the most extreme places imaginable. We're talking about a star potentially dozens of times larger and more massive than our own Sun, which violently dies in a fraction of a second.

Faster than it takes me to say the word supernova, an entire star collapses in on itself, creating a black hole, forming the densest elements in the Universe, then exploding outward with the energy of millions, even billions of stars.

But not in all cases. In fact, supernovae come in different forms, starting with different types of stars, ending with different types of explosions, and producing different types of remnants.

There are two main types of supernovae, type I and type II. I know this seems a little counterintuitive, but let's start with Type II.

These are supernovae produced by the death of massive stars. We did a whole show on this process, so if you want to watch it now, you can click here.

But here's the shorter version.

Stars, as you know, convert molten hydrogen within them. This reaction releases energy in the form of photons, and this slight pressure opposes the force of gravity by trying to pull the star towards itself.

Our Sun does not have the mass to support fusion reactions with elements other than hydrogen or helium. So, once all the helium is used up, the fusion reactions stop and the Sun becomes a white dwarf and begins to cool.

But if you have a star with a mass 8 to 25 times that of the Sun, it can fuse heavier elements into its core. When it runs out of hydrogen, it switches to helium, then carbon, neon, etc., right at the top of the periodic table. However, when it reaches the iron, the fusion reaction consumes more energy than it produces.

The outer layers of the star collapse inward in a fraction of a second, then explode as a Type II supernova. You're left with an incredibly dense neutron star as a remnant.

But if the original star had a mass about 25 times that of the Sun, the same core collapse occurs. But the force of the matter falling inward causes the core to collapse into a black hole.

Extremely massive stars, with a mass more than 100 times that of the Sun, explode without a trace. In fact, shortly after the Big Bang, there were stars composed of pure hydrogen and helium with hundreds or even thousands of times the mass of the Sun. These monsters would have lived very short lives, exploding with an incomprehensible amount of energy.

These are type II. Type Is are a bit rarer and are created when you find yourself in a very strange binary star situation.

One star in the pair is a white dwarf, the long-dead remnant of a main-sequence star like our Sun. The companion can be any other type of star, such as a red giant, a main sequence star, or even another white dwarf.

What matters is that they are close enough that the white dwarf can steal the material from its partner and construct it as a smothering blanket of potential explosiveness. When the stolen quantity reaches 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, the white dwarf explodes in a supernova and completely vaporizes.

Because of this ratio of 1.4, astronomers use Type Ia supernovae as “standard candles” to measure distances in the Universe. Since they know with what energy the explosion occurred, astronomers can calculate the distance to the explosion.

There are likely other, even rarer events that can trigger supernovae, as well as even more powerful hypernovae and gamma-ray bursts. These are probably collisions between stars, white dwarfs and even neutron stars.

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