What Happens When We Explode?

How supernovas and suffering show us the depth of God's faithfulness

“Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these stars, the One who leads forth their host by number, He calls them all by name. Because of the greatness of His might and the strength of His power, not one of them is missing.” ~ Isaiah 40:26

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

When a star dies, it explodes.

Sometimes, anyway.

The life cycle of a star is pretty simple. Giant clouds of gas and dust, called nebulae, provide the nursery environment in which gravity pulls material together to form stars. The more mass involved, the more compressed the material becomes, and eventually it starts condensing inward—forming a hot, glowing ball that’s almost, but not quite, a star.

Not yet, anyway.

As more and more material collapses inward, the ball eventually becomes hot enough to start an atomic reaction called nuclear fusion. Once this process begins, we officially dub the glowing ball of gas a full-fledged star. Yay!

Atoms are the building blocks of the universe—but they don’t like to play nice, since their positively charged nuclei naturally repel each other. In the hot, high-pressure core of a star, though, they get squished together so inescapably that they’re forced to fuse.

In a star, the smallest and most abundant atom is hydrogen. The fusion process begins when hydrogen atoms start fusing together to form helium. What’s interesting about this process is that the resulting helium atom actually weighs slightly less than the original hydrogen atoms, because some of the mass is converted into energy in the form of light and heat. This is what causes stars to shine—and it’s also what pushes outward against gravity, keeping the star from collapsing in on itself.

Eventually, if you leave this process running long enough, the star will run out of hydrogen and be left with mostly helium. The helium then fuses into carbon, then carbon into oxygen, oxygen into silicon, etc, further and further up the periodic table. As this happens, the star swells into a “red supergiant” as it begins fusing heavier elements…

…until it hits iron.

Unlike all of the previous elements, iron fusion doesn’t release any energy. This means that the star can no longer generate any outward pressure to counter the inward force of gravity—and without any ability to fight back, the core simply collapses in on itself.

When this happens, the star doesn’t simply die—what happens next depends entirely on the star’s mass.

A low-mass star simply sheds its outer layers, gently forming a planetary nebula around a now-stabilized core of carbon and oxygen. It doesn’t supernova at all! These small stars end their lives as white dwarfs, gradually cooling and fading away while the nebula it created supports the birth of new planetary systems. (If a white dwarf pulls in mass from a companion star, however, it can eventually explode in a special kind of supernova where it leaves behind nothing at all—as if it never existed)

A massive star undergoes core collapse, which causes its outer layers to rebound off the core and explode outward in a supernova. Since it doesn’t have quite enough mass to form a black hole, the core gets crushed so tightly that protons and electrons combine into neutrons, forming a dense, fast-spinning ball. This is called a neutron star—an object so dense it’s like squishing the Sun into a ball the size of a city and then giving it a swift kick to set it spinning. Very fast.

A very massive star also undergoes a supernova, but this time the gravity is so intense that the core collapses into a black hole. Nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational pull—not even light. Black holes devour everything in their path, dark and seemingly bottomless.

For a truly enormous star, the collapse can go one of two ways: either the core collapses directly into a black hole without any visible supernova, or the star undergoes a pair-instability supernova, in which it completely obliterates itself, leaving behind no remnant at all.

Just like that—gone.

So, basically, stars are crazy.

And I love the feeling of awe that fills me every time I look at them—but even more than that, I feel a pull toward them. God never does anything without purposeful intention, and I don’t think the stars are an exception to that. In fact, I think they’re more like us than we realize.

A star is a flaming ball of gas. It shines simply because elements are fusing together in its core and releasing energy—yet it’s not hard to imagine these little pinpricks of light as alive and breathing. Just like us, with stories of their own, whispering to each other as they twinkle across our night sky.

That is, until they begin fusing elements too heavy to sustain. Then the star dies, and its story ends. As a star, anyway.

But it’s how it dies that determines what comes next—and that is determined entirely by how much weight it’s been burdened with. And here’s the difference between us and the stars: they don’t get to choose how much weight they carry.

We do.

I’ve walked through some seasons of trial and grief in my time—mental, physical, emotional. Probably more than most would expect from someone my age. And I won’t pretend that being a Christian has made those seasons any easier—it hasn’t. I’d say my faith was the only thing that got me through them, but they’ve been long, dark nights of the soul.

But maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to the stars—I see myself in them.

David’s valley of the shadow of death in Psalm 23 is no stranger to me—I’ve walked it a few times. And it always leaves a weight on your soul. One’s heart is never the same after broken, and some things we simply won’t be free of this side of heaven. Like gravity anchoring us to the earth, so are the griefs we carry.

And even the stars above are not free from its pull.

Every star must reckon with its own weight. And it seems to me no accident that the stars burdened with the heaviest weight also shine with the most glorious rebirth. But there is also a warning here:

There are stars who carry too much.

Stars cannot survive under too heavy a burden—same as us. A star crushed under too heavy a burden dies into a black hole, devouring everything around it—or obliterates itself completely, leaving nothing behind.

We were never meant to carry the weight of the universe. God was. He calls us to bring Him our griefs, and they are all the sweeter the heavier they are.

“Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will fine rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” ~ Matthew 11:28-30

I would never be able to truly appreciate the gracious faithfulness of my God if I hadn’t seen such despairing depths in my life. You cannot truly cherish the light of heaven until you’ve seen the darkness that comes from hell.

The hope of new life is not behind you—it’s seen in your end. It is yet ahead of you, shining in the promise of the One who saved us. We may walk through the valley of the shadow of death, but we will not be overcome by it—nor by the prince of this world. For our God has overcome the world itself. He has defeated death, and He will lead us through its shadow into His waiting arms.

The stars may dim and their light may fail—but He who calls them each by name will not let even death be the end of them.

And how much more precious are we to Him than the stars?

—See you in the stars—