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Stars populate the universe with elements through their “lifecycle”—an ongoing process of formation, burning fuel, and dispersal of material when all the fuel is used up. Different stars take different paths, however, depending on how much matter they contain—their mass. A star’s mass depends on how much hydrogen gas is brought ...
Sep 23, 2015 · The background is shaded in different shades of gray to show how much the binary could cause the background star to brighten (see Figure 2 for what was observed). The dark black curves denote the “caustics” of the binary lens: when the background star crosses a caustic, it momentarily becomes infinitely bright if the background star was a point (which is unrealistic—we know stars have ...
- Clues from Our Past
- Looking to Our Future
- Building Our Knowledge of How Stars and Planets Begin
In cosmic phenomena, we see echoes of our distant past. Massive clouds of gas and dust condense into centralized protostars, that in turn emit powerful solar wind and bursts of radiation. A newborn star emerges from its molecular cloud nursery. Material left over from the star’s formation collapses into protoplanets. Each of these observations—now ...
Stars follow different paths as they age, determined by their mass, with the most massive burning their fuel exponentially faster. Smaller stars, like our Sun, live long lives. As they start to run out of hydrogen fuel in their core, they expand and turn red, becoming red giants. The byproducts of fusion collect in the core and, if the star is mass...
Our current understanding of how, when, and where stars and planets form and evolve is advanced through theory and observation. Data from current and next-generation telescopes will inform new computational models for stellar and planetary life cycles. These models are refined and may yield new theoretical discoveries which are in turn tested again...
Viewed from above the north pole, the earth is rotating counter-clockwise. For an observer on the earth, objects move from east to west (this is true for both northern and southern hemispheres). More accurately put, when looking north, objects in the sky move counter-clockwise. Though all objects rotate in the sky, the observed path stars make ...
May 7, 2015 · The life cycle of a low mass star (left oval) and a high mass star (right oval). The illustration above compares the different evolutionary paths low-mass stars (like our Sun) and high-mass stars take after the red giant phase. For low-mass stars (left hand side), after the helium has fused into carbon, the core collapses again.
Stellar Structure and Evolution. Stars are the source of almost all of the light our eyes see in the sky. Nuclear fusion is what makes a star what it is: the creation of new atomic nuclei within the star’s core. Many of stars’ properties — how long they live, what color they appear, how they die — are largely determined by how massive ...
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Models. A stellar evolutionary model is a mathematical model that can be used to compute the evolutionary phases of a star from its formation until it becomes a remnant. The mass and chemical composition of the star are used as the inputs, and the luminosity and surface temperature are the only constraints.
