Professor Lawrence Krauss claims that, “In our galaxy, there are over 100 billion stars alone.” (“Extreme”). Each one of those stars is a factory which slowly builds the materials for the foundations of the universe (“Stars”). Stars are as varied as people. While they are all born the same way, they do not all die the same way. Some stars live fast and die young; others die slowly and quietly (“Extreme”). The life cycle of a star is violent, they churn, pulsate, and sometimes explode, but the products of its life are invaluable building blocks for the Universe. There is a process to the life cycle of a star.
The birth of a star is a process completely fueled by gravity (“Life”). All stars are born in something called a nebula, which is essentially just a cloud of gas and dust. Dr. Michelle Thaller, stated on the documentary How The Universe Works, “All you need to make a star is hydrogen, gravity, and time.” The clouds of gas and dust start to churn rapidly, causing clumps of matter to form. Once the correct mass is reached, they condense under their own gravitational pull and heat up. This clump of matter is known as a protostar (“Stars”). As time progresses, the cloud thickens and starts to spin, a stage that can take hundreds of thousands of years. Gravity will then start to crush the matter into a very hot and dense sphere. Eventually, the pressure that gravity applies upon the sphere causes jets of hot gas to extend out into space. This pressure also causes the star to consume more gas and matter, which only accelerates the heat up process. At the temperature of fifteen million degrees, atoms of gas fuse together, releasing energy, and activating the star (“Extreme”). However, this is not always the case. If a clump of ma...
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When itBetelgeuse cannot fuse anymore anything over iron, the star will not have enough energy to make heat. Eventually, the core will collapse. When Betelgeuse collapses, it is so strong and powerful that it causes the outer layers to rebound. With the rebound it will have an explosion, which is called a Supernova (Type two). The explosion has so much energy and power that the temperature becomes really hot. The temperature is so hot that it can use the fusion process much heavier than iron. The elements that were given off from the explosion are sent throughout space and are now new nebula. When the Supernova is done, it has left behind a star called a Neutron star. They form when atoms of the core of a dead star are crushed together and the end result produces neutrons. The neutrons are with electrons that are degenerate on the surface. Many Neutron stars have magnetic fields and they give off strong waves of radiation from their poles. These types of Neutron Stars are known as Pulsars.
The Big Bang, the alpha of existence for the building blocks of stars, happened approximately fourteen billion years ago. The elements produced by the big bang consisted of hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium. Hydrogen and helium are the essential structure which build stars. Within these early stars, heavier elements were slowly formed through a process known as nucleosynthesis. Nucleosythesis is the process of creating new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons. As the stars expel their contents, be it going supernova, solar winds, or solar explosions, these heavier elements along with other “star stuff” are ejected into the interstellar medium where they will later be recycled into another star. This physical process of galactic recycling is how or solar system's mass came to contain 2% of these heavier elements.
Our Solar System was formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago during the Big Bang with the collapse of an interstellar body (Lammer et al., 2009). During these supernova explosions, the dusts and gases that were expelled were mixed and processed to form the planets of our system (Lammer et al., 2009, Nisbet and Sleep, 2001).
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In conclusion, this experiment helped me understand the many different items that are relevant to identifying a star. I found it interesting that the stars are all different even in the slightest ways. The most luminous stars are in the upper right section of the HR Diagram. These stars are the most developed stars and are where the Supergiants are mostly populated. These super stars are at the end of there life and are the most evolved. I believe that we can learn the most from these stars. Then that knowledge can then be applied to monitor the younger stars. The information we gather from our stars is; “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Neil Armstrong; July 20,
The authors' prospected views on the future of our galaxy are rather harsh. The authors argue that a billion terrestrial years from now-in 10 galactic years-the galaxy will look much like it does now. Certain details, however, will be different. As the sun executes its next ten circuits around our galaxy's central hub, our today-familiar constellations will be scrambled one hundred times over. Many of the night stars in the sky will no longer exist. Deneb and Rigel, for example, will explode as supernovae. Sirious will swell into a red giant and puff out a planetary nebula. Alpha Centauri, currently the sun's closest neighbor, will recede from the sun, and its apparent brightness will fade below the threshold of naked-eye visibility.
Nemiroff, Robert and Jerry Bonnell. "apod.nasa.gov." n.d 1995. Astronomy Picture of the Day. Web. 29 Nov. 2013.
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Stars are born and reborn from an explosion of a previous star. The particles and helium are brought together the same way the last star was born. Throughout the life of a star, it manages to avoid collapsing. The gravitational pull from the core of the star has to equal the gravitational pull of the gasses, which form a type of orbit. When this equality is broken, the star can go into several different stages. Some stars that are at least thirty times larger than our sun can form black holes and other kinds of stars.
Stars are born in the interstellar clouds of gas and dust called nebulae that are primarily found in the spiral arms of galaxies. These clouds are composed mainly of hydrogen gas but also contain carbon, oxygen and various other elements, but we will see that the carbon and oxygen play a crucial role in star formation so they get special mention. A nebula by itself is not enough to form a star however, and it requires the assistance of some outside force. A close passing star or a shock wave from a supernova or some other event can have just the needed effect. It is the same idea as having a number of marbles on a trampoline and then rolling a larger ball through the middle of them or around the edges. The marbles will conglomerate around the path of the ball, and as more marbles clump together, still more will be attracted. This is essentially what happens during the formation of a star (Stellar Birth, 2004).
Human fascination with the stars is as ancient as Babylonians and has been suggested to be older than Stonehenge. From “be fruitful and multiply” to “live long and prosper,” the instinct to protect and propagate the species has manifested in religion, art, and the imaginations of countless individuals. As human understanding of space treks out of the fantastical and into the scientific, the realities of traveling through and living in space are becoming clearer. Exploring, investigating, and living in space pose an expansive series of problems. However, the solutions to the problems faced by mankind's desire to reach beyond the horizon, through the night sky, and into the stars are solutions that will help in all areas of life on Earth.
A star will blow up with the help of gravitational collapses. When a star explodes from nuclear fusion it is because so much mass has built up within its core and it cannot hold the weight. Neutrons are the only things in nature that can stop a core implosion. When a white dwarf suffers a supernova, the energy comes from the runaway fusion of carbon and oxygen in the core.
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