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There are different processes, depending on the type (and particularly mass) of the star. Red Giants are actually a stage in the life cycle of large stars. Our star (the sun) is a yellow dwarf, and as it burns out its first stage, in 4 to 5 billion years, it will expand into a red giant. Our star is putting out massive amounts of energy, by "burning" hydrogen into helium via nuclear fusion. The heat released in this constant state of fusion is the only thing keeping our star from collapsing in on itself, because the gravity is so great. Once all of this fuel is consumed, gravity will regain its leverage over the star, pulling it back inward. The power of the gravity causes fusion again with the new metallic materials within the burnt out sun, which causes it to expand outwards with its dying breath. It is believed that the rim of the red expansion will nearly reach our Earth, or possibly consume it.

Not all red giants will explode. Smaller ones, like our sun will become, will simply collapse into a dense white dwarf, eventually fading out to a brown dwarf and extinguishing as a black dwarf star. The Chandrasekhar Limit for stellar "explosions" is about 1.4 solar masses, or 1.4 times the mass of our sun. Stars that large and larger will "nova" or shed a lot of material in the final throes of the red giant stage, before they collapse into white dwarf stars.

The small population of stars in the range from 8 to 25 solar masses will not become white dwarfs, but will instead explode as supernovas, extremely powerful blasts which compress atomic nuclei into elements heavier than iron, and spraying them out far beyond the perimeter of the progenitor star. These stars do not collapse into a white dwarf but instead leave behind an enormously dense, rapidly spinning remnant known as a neutron star. Neutron stars are essentially atomic nuclei--atoms a quarter mile across that weigh as much as a star 1.5 to 3 times the size of our sun. Clumps of neutronium (degenerate matter, neutrons packed together as close as they can get) that are smaller than that are unstable and therefore do not exist.

After stars larger than 25 solar masses expand into red giants and complete the fuel consumption cycle, they also collapse and burst into supernovas, but the resulting remnant is even denser than neutronium. These stellar remnants pinch out of normal space, forming what are known as "black holes," since their "surface" escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.

Our sun's expansion into the red giant stage is expected to occur gradually four to five billion years from now over a period of about 80 million years. It would be difficult to describe this expansion as an "explosion." The contraction into a white dwarf will probably occur faster than that. Not all red giant stars will explode--only sufficiently massive ones.

The larger a star is, the shorter its life time. Stars that will nova could burn a billion years before doing so. Really big stars could go from birth to cataclysmic death in as little as a million years. The primary factor in determining the length of time between birth (fusion ignition) and death is stellar mass.

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