Hyper Giants are an interesting breed of stars. Usually, in a star, the outward pressure from the fusion reaction at it's core counter-balances the inward pressure from the star's own gravity.

In a Hyper Giant however, something new comes into play. Due to their mass, they can end up fusing so much matter that the gamma radiation caused by this reaction reaches levels so high, that some of it would spontaneously convert into matter. This is essentially a real life example of "e = mc2" put into practice.

This conversion into matter creates pairs of roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, essentially turning the core of the star into an antimatter bomb, which is obviously pretty violent.

However, this isn't the only problem. The conversion from energy into matter also means there's a sudden loss of outwards pressure from the energy, replaced by sudden inwards pressure from the gravity of the newly created matter.

With the legs essentially pulled out from under the core of the star, it starts to collapse at an extremely high rate. For a star with 200-300 solar masses, about 60 solar masses worth of carbon and oxygen fuse into heavier elements almost instantaneously. The resulting explosion is known as a superluminous supernova.

 

An interesting detail is that even though these superluminous supernovae are some of the most intense explosions we know of, the most energetic particles we know about (cosmic rays) are actually not produced directly in these supernova explosions. Instead they're created later on, when the shockwave from the supernova collides with interestellar gas, where it rips apart hydrogen atoms and accelerates the protons to nearly the speed of light.

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