This snapshot of a simulation of the explosion of a supernova in its first seconds shows an area more than 2,500 kilometer across. The outer surface is the blast wave, and the interior coloring is a rendering of the entropy (‘heat’) of the shocked material.
The image is a result of calculations and rendering by Adam Burrows and his collaborators at Princeton, who use supercomputers to simulate some of the most violent, high-energy phenomena in the universe, such as black hole mergers and supernovae.