Whats the difference between large and low mass star explosions?
Low mass stars never explode. Stars with less than about 8 solar masses never burn elements all the way to iron, and then just turn into white dwarfs and fade away. They may blow off their envelopes right before becoming white dwarfs, making “planetary nebulae”, but that’s a slow process, not an explosion. High mass stars (with masses greater than about 8 times the mass of the Sun) do collapse and explode spectacularly. This happens when they accumulate so much inert iron in their cores that the cores can no longer support their own weight by “degeneracy pressure”.
