What determines what happens to a star as it ages?
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What determines what happens to a star as it ages?
As stars grow older, their luminosity increases at an appreciable rate. Given the mass of the star, one can use this rate of increase in luminosity in order to determine the age of the star. As the star spends only about 1\% of its total lifetime as a red giant, this is an accurate method of determining age.
What is the life span of a star?
Stars live different lengths of time, depending on how big they are. A star like our sun lives for about 10 billion years, while a star which weighs 20 times as much lives only 10 million years, about a thousandth as long. Stars begin their lives as dense clouds of gas and dust.
What is the life cycle of a star?
Massive stars transform into supernovae, neutron stars and black holes while average stars like the sun, end life as a white dwarf surrounded by a disappearing planetary nebula. All stars, irrespective of their size, follow the same 7 stage cycle, they start as a gas cloud and end as a star remnant.
How is mass of star determined?
By measuring the size of the orbit, the stars’ orbital speeds, and their orbital periods, we can determine exactly what the masses of the stars are. We can take that knowledge and then apply it to similar stars not in multiple systems. If a star falls on the Main Sequence, we therefore immediately know its mass.
Why does a star’s life expectancy depend on mass?
Why does a star’s life expectancy depend on mass? More massive stars have shorter lifetimes because their larger masses cause them to consume their fuel faster. The more massive a star is, the higher the rate of fusion in the core is due to the larger weight pressing down on the inner layers.
How long stars live depends on how they create _____?
The length of a star’s life depends on how fast it uses up its nuclear fuel. Our sun, in many ways an average sort of star, has been around for nearly five billion years and has enough fuel to keep going for another five billion years. Almost all stars shine as a result of the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium.
What is the average mass of a star?
A normal sized star such as the sun for example has an average weight of about 1.989 × 10^30 kg. Red giants have a weight of roughly 0.8 – 8 solar masses. A neutron star has a mass of about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, but is not much bigger than a small city, about 15 km in radius.
How are mass and lifetime of a star related?
A star’s mass gives a measure of the amount of “fuel”, and its luminosity gives a measure of the rate at which this “fuel” is consumed by nuclear burning, so a star’s lifetime is proportional to its Mass divided by its Luminosity.
What are the stages of the life cycle of a star?
Giant Gas Cloud. A star originates from a large cloud of gas.
Which type of star has the longest life span?
Thread: which kind of star has the longest life expectancy. Red dwarfs live the longest. Vega is a white A-type main-sequence star. Red dwarfs do indeed have the longest life expectancy. Our Sun is a G type star, which is an average star. The Sun is NOT an average star.
What is the average life cycle of a star?
However, for the life cycle of an average star, this can be roughly a few billion to 10 or even 15 billion years. The way a star generates heat and light is pretty simple, through the process of nuclear fusion.
What factor determines the lifespan of a star?
The single biggest factor in determining the lifespan of a star is its size. Bigger stars fuse more hydrogen into helium, due to increased pressure & temperature in their cores.