Iron catastrophe

Okay, imagine you are playing with LEGOs and you have a big pile of different pieces. Now imagine that your mom says you can't play with some of the pieces because they are too heavy and might break your other toys.

In space, there are lots of different pieces that make up stars, including iron. But when a star starts to run out of fuel and burn out, it creates a problem known as the iron catastrophe.

Iron is a really heavy piece in the star LEGO set. When the star uses up all its lighter pieces as fuel, it starts to fuse iron together. This doesn't work very well and causes the star to collapse in on itself.

It's like if you tried to stack all the heaviest and biggest LEGO pieces on top of each other. They would start to fall over and collapse the whole tower.

This collapse can create a huge explosion called a supernova, which can be one of the brightest things in space. The explosion scatters the heavy pieces like iron out into space, which can eventually form into new stars and planets.

So, while iron is an important piece in the star LEGO set, using too much of it can cause the whole thing to collapse in on itself and create a really big mess.