Formation Of New Stars Essay

Below you will read research on stars and black holes. Black holes are stars whose core has been crushed by gravity. In the text to follow you will see how a star forms, read about its life and how it becomes a black hole.

All over our galaxy are pockets of space, filled with dust and gas. Some of these clouds are denser than others, and every once and a while, a cloud of this gas begins squeezing together due to its own gravity. This is when a star begins to form. The cloud begins to form into a rotating disk, with the inner section rotating faster than the outer. The center will begin to heat up because of the pressure and thermonuclear reactions start in its center. Eventually, two hydrogen atoms get squeezed together with extreme pressure so that they fuse into one atom of helium, releasing a massive amount of energy, when this happens; the object is now a protostar. As the star ages, it begins to run out of hydrogen, and the star starts to spasm. It is now a subgiant. The

Stellar evolution stars exist because of gravity. The two opposing forces in a star are gravity (contracts) and thermal nuclear energy (expands). Stage 1 Birth is where gravity contracts the cloud and the temperature rises, becoming a protostar. Protostars are a hypothetical cloud of dust and atoms in space which are believed to develop into a star. Astronomers are fairly certain of their existence. Protostars are formed about a million years after a gas clump from an interstellar gas cloud has started

Many physical properties of stars can be found by using a little bit of light. One property of a star is luminosity. Luminosity is the quantity of energy created in a star and then released as electromagnetic radiation. The brightness of a star is a blend of luminosity and distance of a star and can also depend on the quantity of energy absorbed in the direction of a star. Another property of a star is distance. Astronomers use parallax to establish the distance to an object. As Earth travels around the Sun, they monitor neighboring stars from various positions. They are then able to measure how much the star seems to move to establish the distance to the star.

The life cycle of a star is dependent on its mass. The larger the mass, the quicker it will die out, whereas stars which are no more than half the size of our Sun can live up to hundreds of billion years. However no matter how large the star is, they all begin their lives in a nursery known as a molecular cloud.

Step 1. I know that there are 7 new stars formed yearly in the galaxy, the number of stars is represented by R*. This is the annual rate of star formation that is adaptable for any life. So R* will equal 7 new stars formed every year.

Anna’s typical workday would last from 3:00 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. As part of her observation preparation, she would visit with the observatory staff to discuss new findings and review what has taken place since her last visit. She stars by pulling out a list of dwarf galaxy stars, ordered by priority. She chooses the first star and asks the operator to move the telescope into position so that she can begin collecting starlight data. The article states that her research primary focuses on stars in ultrafaint dwarf galaxies. This article goes onto discuss that after the big bang, the first stars were formed from gaseous clouds. We know the big bang to be when the universe

In this article, it states that 39 light-years away from Earth, there is a belief that science has found a new solar system. That very solar system is special since it has seven planets that are very alike to our Earth. With the terrain being rocky and warm enough that it could support life on it. This discovery is the first time people have ever found that out that there are rocky planets that are orbiting a single star. Before we have the technology we have today, the only terrestrial planets we knew of being four planets. And we didn’t even know much about our solar system, other than our planet and some a few others, but as we reach a new age in our world so many other windows are opening to us as a society.

Way out there in space, there are huge clouds of dust and gas and if one of those clouds of dust and gas is massive enough it's own gravity can causes it to start to collapse. When it collapses, it folds itself towards the center of the cloud, then it get denser and denser and hotter and hotter; eventually the particles of that gas and the dust are made up and brought so close together that they start to stick together. Then they start to fuse, thats the energy source of a star. The star switches and begins to shine. Inside every newborn star, hydrogen atoms are fused together to make helium. This process is called fusion and it creates the energy of every star. A star is a luminous sphere of gas producing its own heat and light by nuclear reactions (nuclear fusion).

The Low mass stars spend there main life as a fusion machine which turns hydrogen into helium and a very slow and methodical pace. When the energy released by this fusion reaches the surface it is released into space and this is the star luminosity. Over a long, long time sometimes billions of years a low mass star consumes the hydrogen in its core and converts it to helium, at which point the core starts to contract and shrink. Once all of the hydrogen inside the stars core begins to become totally exhausted, the core pressure gives way to the crush of gravity because it has no more fusion occurring in its core at that time. As the core shrinks rapidly and the outer layers start to expand the stars shape begins to grow in size and its luminosity becomes extraordinary brighter due to the outer shell starting to produce fusion more rapidly then the core did during the main sequence life of the star. As this situation grows more rapidly and extreme the core starts to rapidly burn again and fuse its core helium into carbon. Then just before its final death the star ejects its outer layers into space. This leaves only the degenerate carbon core and since this core is still very hot it emits intensely powerful ultraviolet radiation and glows brightly in what is known as a planetary nebula. The nebula fades and cools over around a million or so years and we are left with a white dwarf cooling indefinitely till

The larger a star, the shorter their lifespan is, and they explode as supernovae, blasting out powerful shockwaves that create a chain-reaction that spews throughout the galaxy. Within just a few million years, the galaxy is forming stars up to hundreds of times more than a normal galaxy would. When all of the gas available is used up in about ten million years, the galaxy calms down and the period

When observing a star, the lager it is the shorter its life is going to be. The smaller it is the longer the life. Shorter life is not saying much though, as the most massive stars live for billions of years. When a star reaches about middle age, it starts fusing hydrogen into helium. Once it has run out of usable hydrogen that it can convert into helium, it can then take on one of several paths. It can lead to white dwarfs, novae, supernovae, neutron stars or even black holes.

The reactions within these huge stars created new elements, heavier elements such as oxygen and carbon. Lemonick (2006) explains how these elements allowed the gaseous clouds to collapse this time into much smaller stars than their predecessors, stars like our sun. "And like the sun, they would have started out generating lots of ultraviolet light before settling down to a more sedate existence" (p. 4). These smaller stars had the lifespan to be able to ionize the hydrogen. It was at this time that the dark ages came to an end. Some scientists theorize that it was X-rays and UV light spewed from black holes that brought a close to this dark time, but perhaps it was both of these theories that finally brought light to our universe.

There are two different life cycles for stars but they both start out as a 'Stellar Nebula'. It then splits off in to separate stars the Low Mass and The High Mass stars..

Main sequence stars like our own sun enduring in a state of nuclear fusion during which they will produce energy for billions of years by replacing hydrogen to helium. Stars change over billions of years. When their main sequence phase ends they pass through other states of existence according to their size and other characteristics. The larger a star's mass, the shorter its lifespan is. As stars move toward the end of their lives, much of their hydrogen will be converted to helium. Helium sinks to the star's core and raises the star's temperature—causing its outer shell to expand. These large, puffy stars are known as Red Giants. The red giant phase is actually a prelude to a star shedding its outer layers and becoming a small, dense body called a White Dwarf. White dwarfs cool down for billions and billions of years, until they finally go dark and produce no energy at all. Once this happens, scientists have yet to observe, such stars become known as Black Dwarfs. A few stars avoid this evolutionary path and instead go out with a bang, exploding as Supernovae. These violent explosions leave behind a small core that will then turn into something called a Neutron Star or even, if the remainder is large enough, it is then turned into something called a Black Hole.