Death of a Star

Astronomers once considered the death of middling-size stars like our sun almost too boring to bother with. Not that they don’t have some drama--our sun, before it goes, will turn what’s left of Earth to a charred husk. It’s just that larger, very massive stars die in such a spectacular fashion: they flare up, and out, as supernovas, spewing 10 to 100 times the mass of our sun in all directions. So it’s not surprising, then, that for many years they completely stole the observational spotlight. Two decades ago, however, improvements in telescopes and computer simulations began to give astronomers their first detailed understanding of what actually happens when smaller stars die. And last year, when astronomers trained the Hubble Space Telescope on some of these dying stars, the images they got back revealed a process that was far more complex and subtle than anyone had imagined. As it turned out, the stellar demise was anything but a comparatively dull fading into oblivion.