What does a star on the edge of death look like? Perhaps not what you think:
This series of images [as usual, click to embiggen], from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, will take some 'splainin. Hang on. A supernova -- an exploding star -- is among the brightest single objects in the known Universe. A supernova can release as much energy in a single second as the Sun will in a thousand years. Most people think of supernovae as massive stars exploding at the end of their lives, but there is another kind. When the Sun finally dies in a few billion more years, it will shed most of the material making up its outer layers, revealing the white-hot, dense core. This superhot ball will have half the mass of the Sun in it, but only be the size of the Earth. We call such a thing a ...
