3 ms·

“Shattered” seems like an odd way of describing it but at some level… sure.

• JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > “Shattered” seems like an odd way of describing it Would love for an astrophysicist to pine in. But my understanding is supernovae are usually balanced enough to squeeze their stars' cores. This appears to have been unbalanced such that the core was "broken" instead of uniformly compressed.
  • pangeorg 3y ago
    Astrophysicist here :) You are correct in some way to say that the star "squeezes" the core. During the evolution of massive stars, say stars roughly 8 times as massive as our sun, the core grows to a point where it just cannot support itself. It collapses and in consequence triggers the type 2 supernova. Another commenter already mentioned correctly that the remnant of the explosion is typically a neutron star or a black hole. The asymmetries seen in the gaseous remnant are caused by the explosion, which typically is highly asymmetric for stars of larger mass (https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.02420 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.02420, https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09707 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.09707) CasA was a IIb explosion and the neutron star was found in '99 and graciously called 'CXOU J232327.8+584842'. If you want to know more theory about supernovae I highly recommend https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.2503 https://arxiv.org/abs/1206.2503 and others :)