What Happens If Stars Die?

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Stars much larger than our sun meet a violent end, exploding as supernovae that can temporarily outshine an entire galaxy [music] of 100 billion stars.

[00:00:09]These cosmic events forge heavy elements like gold and uranium, which scatter across trillions of kilometers of space.

[00:00:17]The core that remains, if its [music] mass is between 1.4 and three solar masses, collapses into an incredibly dense neutron star, only about 20 km in diameter. A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh over 10 million tons on Earth. If the stellar remnant's mass exceeds three solar masses, >> [music] >> it collapses further, forming a black hole, an object with gravity so intense that nothing, not even light traveling at 299 million 792,458 m per second, can escape its event horizon. Our sun, however, will simply swell into a red giant in about 5 [music] billion years. Its surface expanding to engulf Earth's orbit. It will then shed its outer layers, [music] revealing a white dwarf, a superdense remnant roughly the size of Earth, cooling for trillions of years. [music]