death of a star

Hubble Space Telescope of the Rotten Egg planetary nebula

Stars like our own sun, will eventually run out of hydrogen and begin to collapse upon them-self. There is still some hydrogen burning, however, and this heats up the surface of the star which then expands, gets bigger, and turns into a red giant. Eventually the core becomes hot enough to cause the fusion of helium into carbon. When the core cools again, the upper layers will be ejected. This leaves just the core as a white dwarf. This entire process lasts over 10 billion years

Supernova 1987A Hubble Wide Field Image

Bigger stars, over 10 solar masses, begin by fusing hydrogen into helium and then fusing helium to carbon, but after that is done, the star still has enough mass to fuse the carbon into heavier nuclei, such as oxygen, neon, silicon, magnesium, sulfur and iron. After the majority is converted to iron and the star reaches it's limit, it collapses in under a single second resulting in a neutron star. The homologous collapse makes nearly every bit of matter surrounding the neutron star to smash onto the surface of the neutron star at the same time. This heats up the matter to billions of degrees and creates a supernova.





Here's a visually nice video of the birth and death of stars. I particularly like the expansion of the supernova around 2:15.
Although it should be possible to record an entire event, I do not think any of these were completely recorded but are representations of what we think had happened according to some real observations and models.