Miguel-Ángel Aloy

A pot of boiling porridge, where instead of grains there are layers of oxygen and silicon, and the fire beneath is about to go out, and the star will collapse in on itself. Until now, astrophysicist cooks have used a simplified recipe: they assumed that bubbles and eddies in the porridge obey one and the same average temperature throughout the depth.

In the minutes before a massive star becomes a supernova, a hidden drama unfolds in its depths. A giant cauldron boils: matter churns, rotates, and invisible magnetic threads snap and rejoin. This moment, which has eluded direct observation, has now been recreated for the first time in three-dimensional computer models.