Dear Grady,

I was exploding with excitement to ask my friend Guy Worthey about supernovas. He’s an astronomer at Washington State University.

He told me a supernova is a very energetic explosion in space.

There are different kinds of supernovas. One kind—called a type II supernova—happens when a really big star dies.

“Why would a star bother to blow up?” Worthey said. “It seems dramatic. Human beings don’t blow up when they die.”

But humans don’t have cores that do nuclear fusion. Deep inside a star, protons and neutrons bang together and make new chemical elements. That nuclear fusion is why stars shine.

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