Anonymous asked:
Yes! When stars die, they expand into massive red giants. Our own sun will do this in about 5 billion years, I believe? And when it does, the sun will expand to about where earth’s orbit is! After that, it ejects all of its outer layers into space (creating stellar nurseries for the next generation of stars). All that remains of the star is a White Dwarf. They are extremely small and dense.
When massive stars die, because of gravity and other physics, they actually explode into supernovae. We’ve recoded a bunch of these! We actually use them as a means to measure distances because supernovae (rather a specific subtype of supernovae) always have the same luminosity, so by measuring how bright a supernova was to us, we can tell the distance from it.
As a fun aside, due to the composition of our own star, it’s thought to be a 3rd generation star!
