Join Brian Greene and Stephen Colbert as they discuss hypernovae, an extreme exploding star or dying star. Stephen Colbert begins by asking "What causes a hypernova or what causes explosion in a star?" In response, Brian Greene shows a video illustrating the inner structure of a star. He explains that if you were to penetrate the surface of a star and we go deeper layer by layer then ultimatly we get to the star's core a Nuclear Furnace with temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees a nuclear furnace with temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees. Here, simple atoms fuse together to form more complex ones. As these atoms fuse, they release energy, and that energy streams outward, and that's how stars supports it's own weight. Eventually, the star exhausts its nuclear fuel, no more fusion." at the end he adds that "the star will collapse in on matter rushes in and rebounds".
The brightest supernova ever recorded is called 'ASASSN-15lh' which was picked up by a night-sky survey, the explosion happened 3.8 billion light years from Earth. The supernova or more probably The Hypernova was so powerful that astronomers calculate if this object were 8.6 light-years away like Sirius, the brightest star in Earth's sky, it would appear to shine as brightly as the sun. ASASSN-15lh was so powerful that the authors suspect the original star must have been very massive and when these type of stars run out of hydrogen fuel in their cores, they begin fusing atoms into progressively heavier elements until the core is mostly iron. At this point the star collapses under its own weight, generating a huge explosion and turning the core into an extremely dense neutron star. ]
#supernova #hypernova #briangreene #physicist #science #cosmology
