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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 ...
- A Star Is Born
- All About Mass
- Aging Stars
- The Seismology of Stars
All stars begin their lives in dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust. Even before they become stars, though, much of their future life and structure is determined by the way they form. A star is defined by nuclear fusion in its core. Before fusion begins, an object that will become a star is known as a young stellar object (YSO), and it passes ...
Once YSOs have contracted and heated enough, fusion of hydrogen into helium begins in their cores and they become main sequence stars. The rate of that fusion increases with the mass of the star, so the most massive stars are the shortest-lived. The lowest-mass stars are known as red dwarfs or M dwarfs. These experience convection — the circulation...
During the post-main-sequence evolution when stars grow huge, they may also pulsate in and out due to instabilities in the outer layers of the stellar envelope. These pulsating stars include the Cepheid variables, used in measuring distances within the Milky Way and to nearby galaxies. In addition, massive stars in the last stages of life are the s...
We can’t see directly into a star’s interior. However, just as earthquakes on Earth’s surface reveal what’s going on inside the planet, the behavior of material on the surface of stars provides researchers with information about the interior. Asteroseismology is the study of vibrations of a star. Naturally, the Sun is the star easiest to study. Res...
Representative lifetimes of stars as a function of their masses The change in size with time of a Sun-like star Artist's depiction of the life cycle of a Sun-like star, starting as a main-sequence star at lower left then expanding through the subgiant and giant phases, until its outer envelope is expelled to form a planetary nebula at upper right Chart of stellar evolution
A History of the Universe in 21 Stars (and 3 Imposters) by Giles Sparrow is out now (£12.99, Welbeck Publishing Group). In an extract adapted from his new book, Giles Sparrow tells the story of how the Pleiades star cluster helped astronomers to understand the very nature of stars.
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.
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 ...
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Nov 20, 2023 · Watch the birth of stars in “stellar nurseries” and their transformation into red giants and supergiants. Find out what causes supernovae, how black holes form, and what happens to stars after they die. Witness the never-ending cosmic dance where old stars make room for new ones. Don't hesitate to share this infographic if you like it!
