A Stars Life And Death Sciences Essay

A Stars Life And Death Sciences Essay When we look in the sky at night and see all the stars your eyes can see. We think they are permanent although we may think this technology has given us the chance to see otherwise. Massive telescopes like the Hubble space telescope has let us experience and see the birth and death of stars. Where some stars just burn out and fade away other stars go out with a bang. There are billions upon billions of starts in space and their all different sizes. But only one type of star will collapse in and turn its self into a black hole. A protostar: Let’s start from the beginning, the pillars of creation is a piece of a space nebula 7,000 light years away from earth in the eagle nebula it is just one of the billion birth places of stars. What are they made up of well I’ll tell you they are made up of dust gas and different elements of the periodic table like hydrogen, helium, calcium oxygen silicone and iron. As gravity forces this dust and gas mixture into a flat disc accretion occurs, a process in which more atoms are added to create a protostar. Now at this stage a star is not yet stable because of the countless reactions occurring within the forming star. For this newly forming star to become stable it must reach equilibrium. Equilibrium is the balancing act between the star and gravity. Equilibrium occurs by gas pressure equaling the force of gravity. Gas pressure occurs by thermonuclear fusion which is the combining of the nuclei of small atoms to form the nuclei of larger ones, with a resulting release of large quantities of energy. For nuclear fusion to begin and equilibrium to occur the core of a protostar has to reach 18 million degrees Fahrenheit. When it reaches this critical temperature it will begin nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. And if nuclear fusion doesn’t happen it will end up a brown dwarf. Once nuclear fusion begins a star is born. Main sequence star: A main sequence star is made up of essentially two sections the core w here nuclear fusion occurs and the outer gaseous shell. Stars will live out most of their life in the main sequence just as our sun is. Once a star begins nuclear fusion it becomes self luminous it generates its own heat. Now how long will a star live out its life well that’s hard to tell it all depends on the stars mass and it turns out that how hot a star is will determine the color of the star like for instance a red dwarf star which is  ½ to 1/10 the mass of our sun. With its surface temperature less than 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit and is also the most common type of star in the universe. However we don’t see the small Red stars we see the massive blue main sequence star, its surface temperature is 45,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it is up to 20 times the mass of the sun and up to 10,000 times more luminous than that of our sun. There is however a down side to being a massive blue star. With that being said the less the mass of a star the less atoms a star has to maintai n its equilibrium. The bigger the mass of a star the more atoms a star will have to maintain its equilibrium. With regards to a stars life however the more massive a star the shorter its life will be and the less massive a star the longer it’s life. This is because in larger stars thermonuclear fusion happens at a much faster rate than that of a smaller star. Once a star has reached equilibrium it has not stopped changing there just isn’t a huge amount of change going on, and as we already know a star will live out most of its life in this stage. But we must remember gravity forced the star together to begin with and it also wants to destroy it.