The Cataclysmic Death of Stars
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.
We're lucky that they rarely strike close to home. The last supernova in our own galaxy exploded
in 1604, rivaling Jupiter's brightness in the night sky and deeply impressing Johannes Kepler, the
pioneering astronomer. A nearby supernova--within a few light-years--would bathe the Earth in
annaabi.ee 
