Burnex

Meet Burnex, a giant blue star who burns so brightly that he will not last very long.

A star shines by fusing hydrogen into helium in its core. You might expect a star with more fuel to last longer, but more massive stars have much hotter, denser cores. Their fusion runs far faster, and their brightness rises much more steeply than their mass.

As a rough rule for main sequence stars, the lifetime scales as t ∝ M^−2.5. The Sun will last about 10 billion years. A star with 10 times the Sun's mass then lasts only about 10 billion × 10^−2.5, roughly 30 million years. A red dwarf with half the Sun's mass could last over 50 billion years.

So the sweating blue giant is gone in a cosmic blink, while the small red star sips its fuel slowly.

Many red dwarfs will still be shining long after every star now alive like Burnex has exploded as a supernova.