when a great star dies

Supernova

When a star runs out of the nuclear fuel that keeps it shining, it collapses under its own weight. As it shrinks down, the space and time around it gets more and more distorted. In the late 1930s, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder discovered that, if the star was massive enough, nothing could halt the collapse. The star would shrink down and down and literally cut itself off from the rest of the universe within a black hole.

At the same time that the deep core of the star is imploding, the outer layers of the star are being blown into space in an explosion called a supernova. This movie depicts the final moments before the supernova explosion, where the creation of the black hole releases a burst of energy that pierces through the star and creates a flash of gamma rays that can be seen across the observable universe.