Agiant star died, blasting its guts into space. But before the star detonated, some stellar thief had already stolen the giant’s skin. Now astrophysicists think they’ve identified the culprit: a nearby star blasting its own guts out.
Cassiopeia A, the remnant of a ‘stripped-envelope supernova’, may have actually taken its form from two supernovae in quick succession
©NASA/CXC/SAO
Supernovae are fairly common in space. Most very large stars end their lives as stellar explosions. When they die, hot clouds of gas spread across space. Those clouds are full of the heavy atoms the stars fused into being in the nuclear engines of their bellies.