LINK Red giant star goes supernova — scientists observe it just as it occurs, for the first time ever - pennlive.com

I have been wanting them to catch this happening for years. The NASA Swift Ray gamma telescope Penn. State uses is awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Per Google: "Carbon burning eventually occurs in all stars that start out with more than about eight solar masses. At a temperature of about 6 × 10^8 K, carbon nuclei can fuse to form magnesium,.."

When... " the thermal pressure from fusion is no longer sufficient to counter the gravitational collapse and create the hydrostatic equilibrium found in most stars. This causes the star to start contracting and increasing in temperature until it eventually becomes compressed enough for the helium core to become degenerate matter. This degeneracy pressure is finally sufficient to stop further collapse of the most central material but the rest of the core continues to contract and the temperature continues to rise until it reaches a point (≈1×108 K) at which the helium can ignite and start to fuse.

Whereas a helium flash is a very brief thermal runaway nuclear fusion of large quantities of helium into carbon through the triple-alpha process in the core of low mass stars (between 0.8 solar masses (M☉) and 2.0 M☉[1]) during their red giant phase...(Wikipedia)

. . . just occurred to me
. . . perhaps it is only RedGiants Of Unusual Size (ROUS).

IIRC, a recent article/video mentioned that only (? ) red giants collapse/explode into supernovas.