Mind-blowing far-out stuff from a recent article:
"researchers suggest that blue supergiants can explode as supernovas, because they can form exotic states of matter created by disintegrating protons and neutrons. The resulting soup of particles has generally not been seen in the universe since an instant after the Big Bang.
The nuclei of atoms are made of particles known as nucleons, which include protons and neutrons. Nucleons are, in turn, each made up of trios of particles known as quarks, which are glued together within protons and neutrons by particles known as gluons.
Under extreme pressures and temperatures, nucleons can break down, forming an exotic state of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma. The researchers suggested that this process of disintegration, called quark deconfinement, could generate "a large amount of heat," resulting in a supernova, study lead author Tobias Fischer, at the University of Wrocław in Poland, told Space.com.
The scientists used computer simulations to model the evolution of a supernova from a blue supergiant 50 times the mass of the sun. They found that quark deconfinement could explain a wide variety of supernovas. They also found that after supernovas occur from blue supergiants, the remnants of those stars form "hybrid stars" — neutron stars about twice the mass of the sun, with cores made of soups of free quarks."
@bunnyknight
But apparently not enough mass leftover to form a black hole, so an in betweener.
BTW, astronomers now believe that there could be over 100 million neutron stars just in the Milky Way. Also most of these are probably very old and virtually undetectable due to loss of heat and radiation, and one of them could be very close to Earth without us knowing it.
Just thinking about it shivers my bones and makes my fur stand up.