The Death Star

Explosions of extraordinary violence blast through the Universe every day. They are so powerful that if they ever struck our solar system, we would be utterly destroyed. For years no one could work out what was causing them, but now scientists think they have cracked it. The culprit is the most extreme object ever found in the universe - a hypernova. These hypernovas are the death cries of massive stars twenty times the size of the Sun, which meet their ends in vast, apocalyptic explosions. Hypernovas may hold the key to one of the mysteries of the universe - how, billions of years ago, the very first stars were made and the process that created everything we see in the universe began.