A bizarre stellar explosion peeled back the layers of a dying star, revealing secrets of how the universe makes the elements we depend on. (An illustration of the ‘extremely stripped’ supernova 2021yfj.) Credit: Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko Astronomers have glimpsed the inner structure of a dying star in a rare kind of cosmic explosion called an “extremely stripped supernova.” In a paper published in Nature , Steve Schulze of Northwestern University in the United States and colleagues