Discover inside the star

Physicists working at Argonne National Laboratory (USA) use supercomputers to build a model of the demise of big stars.

The picture illustrates the energy levels in the dying star core. The cooler the color, the greater the energy level.

The last moment of the super-big star before exploding. The energy released by the explosion could be equivalent to 1027 hydrogen bombs, each with 10 million tons of TNT.

The explosion only lasted nearly 5 seconds, but the supercomputer had to mobilize 160,000 processors to simulate it.

The picture above illustrates the three processes of burning the nucleus inside a big explosion. The image of the fire is on the far left. The image in the middle and right illustrates the speed and direction of the fire.

The 3-dimensional image illustrates the giant nuclear flame inside a white dwarf. The buoyancy made the fire move very quickly to the surface of the star to spark the explosion of white dwarfs. Such explosions occur only in the shell - where the material is attracted to - so it does not affect the star core. So they can repeat many times if stars continue to absorb hydrogen gas.

Close-up shots have a high resolution of a nuclear flame inside a white dwarf. It illustrates the complex and chaotic processes within the fire when a white dwarf explosion takes place.