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Astrophysics

Different stellar demise

Nature volume 462, pages 579–580 (2009)Cite this article

A decades-old theory of stellar evolution — that the most massive stars end their life in a peculiar type of explosion termed a pair-instability supernova — finally seems to have been confirmed by observations.

Whereas the final evolutionary stage of a low-mass star such as the Sun is that of a simple white dwarf, the life of a massive star ends in a spectacular explosion called a supernova (SN). This theoretical view of stellar demise has been verified many times, most prominently through observations of SN 1987A, a supernova that occurred in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Neutrinos detected from SN 1987A confirmed the idea that such supernovae are triggered by the gravitational collapse of the iron core of their progenitor star1. But theory predicts that stars more massive than 140 solar masses could find another way to blow up — through the thermonuclear explosion of oxygen. On page 624 of this issue, Gal-Yam et al.2 report that SN 2007bi provides the first evidence of such an explosion. Their study opens up the way to understanding the fate — and the mere existence — of the most massive stars, which may have dominated the early evolution of the Universe.

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Figure 1: Fate of the most massive stars.

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  1. Norbert Langer is at the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, University of Bonn, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany. nlanger@astro.uni-bonn.de

    Norbert Langer

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Langer, N. Different stellar demise. Nature 462, 579–580 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462579a

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