“Why does popcorn jump when it bursts?”

Emmanuel Virot explains, carefully, why he believes popcorn bursts when it jumps:

Details, in writing, burst from the pages of the study “​Popcorn: critical temperature, jump and sound,”  by E. Virot and A. Ponomarenko, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface [12, 20141247 (2015)]. Virot  contemplates popcorn at the Hydrodynamics Laboratory at École Polytechnique.

The study begins with the sentence: “Popcorn is the funniest corn to cook, because it jumps and makes a ‘pop’ sound in our pans. “