The Cataclysmic Death of Stars
for blowing things up. Growing up in the late 1950s in Texas, "I did everything you could do
with potassium nitrate, perchlorate, and permanganate, mixed with a lot of other things," he says.
"If you mixed potassium nitrate with sulfur and charcoal, you got gunpowder. If you mixed it
with sugar, you got a lot of smoke and a nice pink fire." He tested his explosive concoctions on a
Fort Worth golf course: "I screwed the jar down tight and ran like hell."
"kaboomWoosley", now an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has
graduated to bigger explosions--much bigger. Woosley studies some of the most powerful
explosions since the birth of the universe: supernovae, the violent deaths of stars.
The universe twinkles with these cataclysms. They happen every second or so, usually in some
unimaginably remote galaxy, blazing as bright as hundreds of billions of stars and creating a
fireball that expands and cools for months.
annaabi.ee 
