The Cataclysmic Death of Stars
explosions in computers. They start with a whopper of a star, about 40 times the mass of the sun,
spinning so fast--several hundred miles a second at the equator--that it barely keeps from flying
apart. Near the end of its life, unable to resist the pull of its own gravity, the core of the star
collapses to make a black hole. But because the star has so much spin, some of the infalling
material resists the tug of the newborn black hole. A swirling disk of material forms around the
hole--a maelstrom deep within the doomed star.
"Rotation is the name of the game," says Woosley. Without spin, there would be no disk. And
without a disk, there'd be no burst. Friction heats the disk, whipping around the black hole
thousands of times a second, to 40 billion degrees (22 billion degrees Celsius), while new
material keeps cascading in. Moments after the black hole forms, jets of superheated gas
blowtorch outward.
annaabi.ee 
