Tag: Stars
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The death of stars
Stars inevitably run out of fuel to burn in the nuclear fusion reactions that burn in their cores and when this happen there are a number of spectacular events that occur in their death throes. As a star goes through its main sequence stage it burns hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion. As it starts…
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What are the different types of stars?
In my last few posts I have talked mainly about the Sun, our closest star but what other types of star are there? Clearly by looking at the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram there are different types; cooler, dimmer smaller stars to brighter, hotter and massive stars. Astronomers class the stars according to a property called it’s Spectral…
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H-R Diagrams
I described stars in my last post and I talked about two that are different colours; Rigel and Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion. Rigel is a blue super giant and Betelgeuse is a red super giant but what is the Sun, how do we classify stars as super giants and what other types of…
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What are Stars?
Stars are all those little pin points of light in the night sky that slowly move around the sky throughout the year, but what exactly are they? Stars are the furnaces of the universe; a single star is a huge collection of matter that is gravitationally pulling itself together into a sphere and this gravitational…
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What did the Sun ever do for us?
The Sun. That great big ball of fire in the sky. But what did it ever do for us? At the simplest level the Sun gives us light and warmth. As humans this is what we need to survive. It provides us with day and night as it lights up the day side of the…
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Populations of Stars
How old are stars? Stars are categorised into three groups:- Population III – The oldest Population II Population I – The youngest (Our Sun) Population III are the oldest stars that are thought to have burned close to the big bang at around 400 Million years afterwards. In the time since recombination (~380,000 years after…
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Element Formation in Stars
We are all made of star stuff, the left of detritus from stars that exploded long ago. Nearly all the elements in the solar system, Milky Way and beyond were created in the extreme conditions at the centre of stars. Ultimately you and I are made from this star stuff. Were do the elements come…