When can a star explode?

Answer 1

The phenomenon that occurs when massive stars explode is a supernova. This happens to stars that are more massive than the sun. They are called hypergiants. In such a star, the core collapses leading to the explosion.

Answer 2

It'll expand into a Red Giant and slowly just... fizzle away. It's gravity will be too weak to hold on to its gas, so it will slowly flow into space. What will be left is called a White Dwarf. If the star is bigger than our sun, it will explode and become a Neutron Star. An even bigger one will also explode and make a Black Hole. There are a few variations, such as Magnetars, which are Neutron Stars with unusually hign magnetic fields, but the first three I mentioned are the most common.

Answer 3

The short answer is that stars create heavier atomic nuclei when they explode; but there is an awful lot of additional information that comes packaged in that brief statement. Entire books have been written explaining the details involved. The first thing you need to understand is that a star is a huge ball of mainly hydrogen gas; and that what makes it glow is that its mass provides enough gravity to crush the atoms of hydrogen gas together to form helium gas, releasing lots of energy in a process we call fusion. The energy from the fusion not only makes the star glow, but it also provides an outward push that keeps the star's gravity from collapsing it too much. When the pull of gravity is properly balanced by the outward push of energy, we say that the star is in equilibrium and we call it a main-sequence star. (1) Small mass stars, smaller than our sun -- These red dwarf and brown dwarf stars probably will never explode. They just don't have enough mass to provide the gravity that's needed for explosive fusion. Boring little stars, they stay in equilibrium virtually forever. (2) Medium-small stars like our sun -- When these yellow/white stars begin to run low on hydrogen atoms, the inner core of the star gets pulled smaller and hotter by gravity, and the outer shell gets pushed larger and cooler by the increased energy from the core. Eventually the star's core suddenly fuses the accumulated helium into carbon, and the sudden release of energy explosively blows away the outer shell. This relatively low-power explosion is called a nova, and the planet-size core that remains is called a white dwarf. This will happen to our sun roughly 5 billion years from now. (3) Large stars -- When one of these blue giants reaches the point where it runs low on hydrogen, its core collapses and becomes immensely hot, while its outer shell gets pushed out to the size of our entire Solar System. We call this dying star a supergiant. At some critical point, the core flash-fuses its contents into heavy nuclei in just a fraction of a second, creating a nuclear fusion bomb of incredible power that we call a supernova. The core that remains following a supernova can be an unimaginably dense ball of neutrons called a neutron star; or it can be so dense that it effectively leaves the known universe, creating a gap in space-time that we call a singularity, or more popularly a black hole.Please accept that this answer is necessarily greatly abbreviated and omits a lot of details. This is just an attempt to hit some of the highlights. There are a lot of different possible outcomes for an exploding star. There are some possibilities that we're not sure of, and a good chance of some possibilities that we've never seen.

Answer 4

A star can explode whenever it runs out of helium to turn into carbon. Only high mass stars explode, though. It is called a supernova.

Answer 5

it becomes a black hole