The Life of Stars

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Stars are born within clouds of dust and swirling wind in our atmosphere. The turbulence within these clouds creates enough gravitational force between the gas and dust that it begins to collapse upon itself and becomes more dense and hot further into the cloud. The cloud continues to collapse, collecting dust and gas around the hot center which is called a protostar. (http://science.nationalgeographic.com) Protostars are not hot enough to emit visible light in their early stages, but emit infrareds. In their later stages, protostars emit more visible light, but images taken with visible light telescopes have a difficult time seeing past the large masses of dust around stars, if the stars aren’t very bright.(http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu) Stars the size of our sun are estimated to mature within a period of about 50 million years, this is from initial cloud collapse, to adulthood. Our sun should stay in this mature phase for about 10 billion years, and it is estimated that the sun is at the middle of its lifetime. Stars are given life from nuclear fusions of hydrogen; forming helium deep within them. The energy moves outward, giving the entity enough resistance to the pressure of collapsing under its own weight, and making it shine. Some stars shine faintly and some shine brighter or hotter than the sun. Red Dwarfs are the smallest of stars, and shine for tens of billions of years. Hypergiants, the largest stars in the known universe are one hundred or more times larger than our sun, and emit hundreds of thousands of times more energy. That being said, their lifetimes are only about a few million years, which is much shorter than that estimated of our sun. Hypergiants were believed to be common in the early universe, but are... ... middle of paper ... ...r distant. The stars are what we shall always seek. Works Cited http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/how-do-stars-form-and-evolve/ http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/cosmic_reference/starform.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-stars-die-sodium-space-astronomy-science/ http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/stars-article/ http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/ http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeedu/kstars/ai-colorandtemp.html http://www.bobthealien.co.uk/stardiff.htm http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/pulsars.html http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/home.html http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/supernovae.html http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/star_intro.html http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/istp/outreach/workshop/thompson/facts.html

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