The Cataclysmic Death of Stars
back." To make a collapsing star explode, he says, "there needs to be something else."
In the stars that launch gamma-ray bursts, the spinning black hole and the disk may pump out
enough energy to blow the star apart. But in most collapsing stars, the collapse ends when the
Earth-size core crunches into a neutron star the size of a city, at a temperature of a hundred
billion degrees (55 billion degrees Celsius). This is the point of maximum scrunch. The squeezed
core rebounds like a squished sponge, launching a shock wave that races outward, ramming into
the material that is still pouring down from the star's outer layers.
Astronomers once thought this shock would be enough to tear the star apart and generate the
explosion, says Adam Burrows of the University of Arizona. Turns out it's not so simple.
Simulating a supernova gobbles enormous amounts of computer power, and even the largest
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