With a Bang and a Whimper


Note: Even though this blog talks about how stars die, you don’t need to know or even care about physics to (hopefully) enjoy it.

Most stars, including our sun, will run out of fuel and then the light will go off. Pretty tame.

Then there are the bigger stars that could end up as white dwarfs or neutron stars. These stars, once they run out of fuel, get compressed to extraordinary densities and eventually all that compressed and heated matter begins to glow. But once it has radiated away the heat, it’s over. That’s more interesting than the ultimate fate of our sun, but not exactly riveting stuff either.

Next come the supernovas: even more massive stars that literally blow themselves up at the end. Spectacular to watch no doubt but very dangerous if one happens too close to home because of all that radiation. Somewhat like the way suicide bombers die, except the star didn’t “want” to kill itself or others around it.

Until now, I thought supernovas are the most spectacular way a star could die. I may have been wrong. With ever better telescopes, we’ve now seen stars that got too close to a black hole and got torn apart by it…literally. This may be the only scenario where a star is “killed” before it has run its natural course. And I can’t help the analogy to humans: it may be like that poor gladiator who got too close to the tiger at the coliseum!

Apparently blood and gore scenarios are popular even in the stellar world!

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