What happens when a massive star explodes?

Question

question on science sheet

Answer 1

I forms a black hole!

First, the fusion reactions stop and then it starts collapsing under its own weight until it makes a singularity!

Answer 2

  The debris blasts away from the site of the event,crashes into the surrounding hydrogen field and produces solar systems like ours.

Answer 3

Two events may happen:

1. Star explodes and a neutron star is left. Neutron star then turns into a white, then black dwarf.

2. Star collapses on itself by its own gravity, creates a black hole.

Answer 4

it goes supernova

some scientists theorize that after such a massive supernova occurs it creates a black hole in the vacuum it leaves behind

Answer 5

AP

This artist's illustration provided by NASA shows what the brightest supernova ever recorded, known as SN 2006gy, may have looked like when it exploded. The star "is a special kind of supernova that has never been seen before," the discovery team leader Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley said.

MASSIVE SUPERNOVA

The death of a star A massive, faraway stellar explosion has scientists reassessing the deaths of the earliest stars and wondering if they've caught a preview of a spectacular detonation close enough to Earth to light up the daytime sky, astronomers said Monday.

The explosion, discovered Sept. 18, was traced to a galaxy 238 million light-years away, and a star estimated to be 150 times as massive as the sun.

"We've discovered a supernova that stands out as by far and away the most powerful and brightest that has ever been observed," said astrophysicist Nathan Smith, of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the studies. "The reason we are so excited is that it may require a new type of explosive mechanism that has been predicted theoretically but not observed before."

Supernova is the term astronomers use for aging stars as they exhaust their fuel and explode. Prior to its detonation, the recently discovered supernova 2006gy rivaled the massive size of the earliest stars in the universe, said Mario Livio, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

They are rare in the modern universe. The Milky Way galaxy, with 400 billion stars, includes only a handful of the giants, including Eta Carinae, which is 7,500 light-years away.

Most supernovas occur when stars like the sun collapse under their own gravity after exhausting fuel supplies. A larger class of stars collapse into black holes under the tremendous gravity.

In studies that will be reported in the Astrophysical Journal, Smith and others suggest the core of 2006gy produced such massive amounts of gamma radiation that some of the energy was converted into subatomic particles of matter and anti-matter. As energy produced by the radiation fell, the star collapsed and exploded in a brilliant fury.

The explosion was discovered by University of Texas graduate student Robert Quimby.

Studies of 2006gy made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space telescope launched in 1999, as well as by ground-based telescopes, offer an explanation for the stellar death in the early universe, when massive stars were more common, Smith said.

The explosions sent remnants of the dying stars into interstellar space. There, the debris became building blocks for future generations of stars.

The 2006gy studies have astronomers taking a closer look at Eta Carinae, which is mimicking some of the behavior of the supernova.

"We think 2006gy was very similar to Eta Carinae in our own galaxy, and a galactic supernova would be a spectacular event," said Livio. "It would be so bright you could see it in the daylight. You could read a book by it at night."

Eta Carinae would explode with a brightness equal to 10 percent of the moon's. Though spectacular to see, the blast should pose no danger to Earth.

"I think we can sleep quietly, tonight," Livio said.