by Wil Player

Created on: June 14, 2008

The Universe is a big place; it is so big that most Homo sapiens really can not get their heads around exactly how big a galaxy is, let alone the size of the Universe. If you were to count every grain of sand on every beach on the face of this planet you still would not have accounted for every star that exists in the Universe.

We seem to think that traveling to another country is far away but that is nothing compared to the size of the Cosmos. Light from the Sun take eights minutes to reach the Earth, that means that the light has traveled an amazing 89 million miles before it gets to the Earth. But this distance is still absolutely nothing compared to the size of our galaxy.

With estimates, we can gauge that the length of our Milky Way Galaxy is approximately one hundred and fifty thousand light years across. This means that if the light from our sun was to travel from one corner to the other; it would take a staggering 150,000 years for it to do so. We are not even taking into account that our Earth is in one tiny tiny part of one massive galaxy out of possibly hundred of thousands of galaxies that exist in the Universe. Do you see how insignificant we really are?

When a star is about to die; once it has burnt all of its hydrogen fuel, the core of the star begins to cool, due to the lack of fuel to burn. Once the pressure of the retracting core reaches a certain limit it causes other fuels to be burnt. In this case it will burn the helium that is the left over waste product from the burning of hydrogen in a fusion process. Again, once the star has depleted it source of fuel, it begins to cool down and contract.

This process will continue until all the stars fuel has be converted so many times that all is left is heavy metals such as iron or lead. Because of the density of these materials, it is very hard for the stars fusion process to convert these materials any further. No fusion can occur within the star because of these materials, so the core begins to cool and shrink again but this time collapse is ineviatable.

The pressure at the core builds until it can no longer support the material surrounding it and the stars core collapses onto itself. The collapse of the material is centered on a singular' point at the center of the core. The collapse of the star happens within a split second and the velocity of the material is so high, that the material is traveling with so much potential energy that it rebounds off the center of the collapsing star, causing the

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