The Violent Deaths of Giant Blue Stars May Spawn Exotic Matter

[Judi Lynn]

By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | October 31, 2018 01:20pm ET

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When a blue supergiant star explodes in a supernova, it can spawn exotic states of matter like quark-gluon plasma, scientists have found. Blue supergiant stars are colossal, growing to up to 1,000 times larger than our sun, as this NASA illustration shows.
Credit: S. Wiessinger/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

When the biggest stars in the universe die, they may form exotic states of matter generally not seen in the universe since fractions of a second after the Big Bang. These events may generate enough energy to create catastrophic explosions, a new study finds.

A supernova is an explosion that can make a star briefly outshine all the other stars in its galaxy. These outbursts can happen when giant stars that are about 10 times the mass of the sun or more run out of fuel. Their cores then collapse under their own extraordinary weights, so that the objects form either black holes or neutron stars.

Previous work suggested that when a star's core implodes, a burst of ghostly particles known as neutrinos carries much of the energy from this collapse outward. When these neutrinos interact with the shell of material around the star's core, they heat it up and can drive it outward explosively as a supernova. [Supernovas! The Explosive Deaths of Stars in Photos]

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https://www.space.com/42295-blue-supergiant-stars-supernova-quarks.html