Daichi Tsuna

A light bulb that doesn't burn out but flares brighter and brighter until it blows the whole fixture apart. That's roughly how the most massive stars in the universe die. When a star's core heats up to billions of degrees, pairs of particles (electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons) begin to form.

In the heart of a dense star cluster, a true forge reigns: here stars, like glowing blanks, collide and merge under gravity, and these mergers are not a catastrophe but an opportunity. Each strike of the stellar hammer transfers spin to the future black hole.

On August 6, 1181, Chinese astronomers spotted a new star in the constellation Cassiopeia. It shone for 185 days, slowly fading, and then vanished, leaving only a record in the chronicles. Today, at its location, there is a hot white dwarf — a compressed stellar core with no nuclear reactions, heated to tens of thousands of degrees.