A Dying Star's Core Hits 100 Billion Degrees

For one second, a dying star becomes the hottest furnace in its entire galaxy.

When a giant star runs out of fuel, its core collapses in less than a second, crushing matter until it rebounds in a supernova, one of the most violent events in the universe.

At the instant of collapse, the core temperature spikes to around 100 billion degrees Celsius. That's thousands of times hotter than the center of our Sun. It's so extreme that the heat tears atoms apart and floods space with ghostly particles called neutrinos. In that blistering core, elements are forged in seconds: the iron in your blood, the calcium in your bones, scattered across the galaxy by the blast.

And it's fleeting. That 100-billion-degree core lasts only moments before it cools or collapses into a neutron star or a black hole. The hottest furnace in the galaxy burns for barely a heartbeat.

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