[ WP ] Stars have brilliant deaths , large explosions given a beautiful name . Men are granted nothing so glorious .

Main sequence stars simply peter out, expelling most of their mass in dying breaths, the remainder collapsing slowly to form cold, inert, dim dwarves of what they once were. 
 
 Most of us get this. A hospital bed, organs simply shutting down one by one, your soul shutting off the lights one last time before stepping out for good. Or maybe you get the bad luck of being in the way of something with a lot more momentum than you. Bullet, speeding car, long fall, its all the same basic thing. Something that is not you hit you hard enough to fuck you up. Whether it just flips the switch to'off' or slowly dims the lights for a few minutes of screaming and bleeding. A hole in the ground or a cloud of hydrogen dissipating in space, man and star, not worth recording. 
 
 Most. 
 
 Massive enough stars do n't go so unnoticed. Their sheer size allows them to burn through their hydrogen fuel several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary stars. As that initial fuel runs dry, helium, the ashes of the nuclear reaction at its core, collect in the middle and begin to fuse under the intense pressure. So it goes through the elements, carbon, oxygen, silicon. Each element burns hotter and quicker than the previous, keeping the star safe from the unrelenting gravitational pressure of it's own mass. It's mass being the only thing that allows it to burn the heavier elements. Soon the interior of the stars resembles an onion, inert shells of former fires surrounding and guarding the yet more intense new born flame at the heart. 
 
 Until it reaches iron. Iron requires outside energy to fuse. No longer can the star hold back the inevitable reckoning of its own nature's conflict with governing physics. So it dies. The apotheosis of its death moves it out of the main branch, to it's own standing. 
 
 It's shell, expanding and growing hotter through its life, collapses in on itself at three fourths the speed of light. The shell strikes the iron core, rebounds and rips the star apart in violence. For a brief moment, that single star can outshine its entire galaxy. 
 
 A supernova. This very second 65 billion neutrinos are passing through every square inch of your skin, in your life time maybe two or three will interact with another particle. A supernova produces enough neutrinos to instantly kill you at the range of the orbit of Jupiter. 
 
 And what happens after it dies is where it gets interesting. Every single atom of everything heavier than iron was produced in the leading edge of a supernova's shockwave. The stars ashes become interstellar dust, which will begin to coalesce together to form nebulae, the birth place of new stars. 
 
 And in the place the light once shined remains a black hole. A region so dense the star finally breaks the laws of physics that governed its death. A place where nothing, not even a hint of what went before, can return to those of us who have yet to cross that threshold. 
 
 Destroyers of world, lynch pins of galaxies, simply strange signals from the sky. What role the black hole is to become is no longer a concern for the star. 
 
 So with stars, so with man. Be born in the right situation, the right time, the right place, with enough mass, enough conviction and will, and you too could die young, your memory outshining entire nations in the hearts of man. 
 
 Get put in front of a wall and shot in Dublin and a terrible beauty is born. Put a needle in your arm at 27 and inspire generations. Have Pilate wash his hands of you and change the world. And a thousand years later, someone might look up in awe at the new light in the sky.
