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If you have a nickel sitting in your pocket, take it out, and feast your eyes on a small piece of a supernova.
“All heavy elements in the universe come from supernova explosions. For example, all the silver, nickel, and copper in the earth and even in our bodies came from the explosive death throes of stars,” Steve Howell, Kepler project scientist, said in the statement. “Life exists because of supernovae.”
Now, for the first time, thanks to the Kepler telescope, scientists saw the breathtaking early stages of a star’s death, one that was 500 times the size of our own sun.
As NASA explains:
The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout” — is illustrated in this cartoon animation. The animation begins with a view of a red supergiant star that is 500 times bigger and 20,000 brighter than our sun. When the star’s internal furnace can no longer sustain nuclear fusion its core to collapses under gravity. A shockwave from the implosion rushes upward through the star’s layers. The shockwave initially breaks through the star’s visible surface as a series of finger-like plasma jets. Only 20 minute later the full fury of the shockwave reaches the surface and the doomed star blasts apart as a supernova explosion. This animation is based on photometric observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
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