In the year 1604, Johannes Kepler, a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, witnessed the most recent supernova to be seen by the naked eye within the Milky Way galaxy. Though he was not the first to see it, his discovery lead to multiple scientific breakthroughs, including the theory that not all stars are in fact Suns, and that not all stars behave in the same way. But what is a supernova? What does it do? This report has been written to educate the reader on these subjects, and their relevance. Kepler originally believed that the supernova he saw was actually the birth of a new star, and although this could technically have been true, the supernova itself is not a star. A supernova is, in short, the explosion of a star of large mass or of a white dwarf that is circling around the same point as another star, leaving the material that made up the star scattered about the area surrounding the supernovae and either a black hole or cluster of neutron stars. It is important to remember that, not all stars will become …show more content…
The simpler of the two is the one illustrated above, when a massive star becomes a red supergiant. Due to the size of the star, the fuel within it (hydrogen), is burnt faster than it would be in a large star. The star eventually collapses on itself due to its size, and explodes as a supernova, causing all of the elements and nuclear material within it to be spread amongst the universe. The second form is slightly more complicated, but is the type of supernova Johannes Kepler was believed to have seen, according to research of the residue. This second form of supernovae is created when a white dwarf and another star orbit the same point. The white dwarf begins to absorb the mass of its partner star, eventually gaining enough mass to collapse on itself and become a supernova. Without Kepler’s supernova, we may have never been able to identify this form of supernova (a la