Future Blasts

No star lasts forever. But some stars will expire more impressively than others: They’ll blast themselves to bits in titanic explosions. And several stars that are visible in April’s evening skies face that ending.
A bunch of them are in Orion, which is in the southwest at nightfall. Its belt of three stars is parallel to the horizon. Four brighter stars form a rectangle around the belt.
All seven of those stars will become supernovas. That’s because all of them are supergiants — they’re many times the mass of the Sun.
Such stars “burn” through their nuclear fuel in a hurry. They quickly reach a point where the reactions stop. When that happens, the star’s core collapses to form a neutron star or a black hole. Its outer layers fall inward, then rebound. They blast into space at up to a few percent of the speed of light. For a while, the explosion can outshine an entire galaxy of normal stars.
In Orion, the stars closest to that end probably are Betelgeuse, the bright orange light above