The research, conducted using the supercomputers
The largest explosions in the Universe, so-called 'supernovae', occur when stars many times larger than our own Sun reach the end of their lives and exhaust the nuclear fuel at their centres. At this point the innermost part of the star, an iron core itself about 1.5 times as massive as the Sun, succumbs to gravity and collapses to an ultra-dense neutron star within a fraction of a second.
"Scientists have been puzzled about how the collapse of a star turns into an explosion," said the lead author of the research, Dr Bernhard Müller, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, and the Monash Centre for Astrophysics.
"The research team worked on a solution to this problem, and the most promising theory suggests that light and weak interacting particles called neutrinos are the key to this."
Vast numbers of neutrinos are emitted from the surface of the young neutron star, and if the heating caused by the initial collapse is sufficiently strong, the neutrino-heated matter drives an expanding shock wave through the star and the collapse is reversed.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-d-supernova-simulations-reveal-mysteries.html#jCp
