Cosmic Nurseries - Mommy, Where do Stars Come From?
Since my entire thesis for this paper is about how a star is born, I guess the first thing I should start out with is by telling you exactly what a star is. Stars are self-luminous gaseous spheres. They shine by generating their own energy and radiating it off into space. The stars' fuel for energy generation is the stuff they are made of --hydrogen, helium, carbon, etc. -- which they burn by converting these elements into heavier elements. Nuclear fusion occurs, which is when the nuclei of atoms fuse into nuclei of heavier atoms. The energy given off by a star through nuclear burning heatsits interior to many millions and, even in some cases to Pleiades Star
…show more content…
During this time around the particles that make up the cloud have been getting even hotter and have been giving off more visible light and less infrared
Dark Bok Globules in IC 2944 radiation. Because it is cooler dust in the surrounding stellar nebula out of which the star is forming, it absorbs photons, heats up, and gives off energy as infrared radiation. As the star cools it also starts to spin much more rapidly. So, the stellar nebula hides the baby star until most of the surrounding gas and dust in the nebula is either attracted to it or blown away by it.(Goldberg, 1982) Eagle Nebula—formed by forming stars.
During the next step of star formation the spin, pressure, and temperature inside the interstellar cloud continue to increase. Due to these increases the Bok Globules will split into the protoplanetary disk and the central core. The protoplanetary disk has the potential to actually change form and become planets. On the other hand, the central core will go on to become one of those loveable pin pricks of light in the sky that we call stars. (Strobel, Unknown)
During the next step of stellar birth, the core continues to increase in temperature and whenthe forming star has stabilized itself, then it has become a protostar. The temperature of a protostar's surface is
When stars died, chemicals other than hydrogen and helium formed, which led to the next level of complexity—Heavier Chemical Element. Most stars spent about 90% of their life over billions of years on during protons and hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei. When they run out of fuel, the furnace at the center of the star stopped supporting the star, and gravity took over. Small stars did not have much pressure at the center. They burned hydrogen slowly over billions of years at relatively low temperatures. When they died, they would slowly fade away. However, great stars had so much mass that they can create enormous pressures and temperature, and when the giant stars ran out of hydrogen, the temperature got cranked up even higher, which led the star to collapse. The high temperature that the collapse caused was able to make helium nuclei fuse into nuclei of carbon. When a star used up its helium, it collapsed again, and the cycle started over. The star heated up and began to fuse carbon to form
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
Soon after the big bang the cosmic dust as well as gases combined and cooled off together to form stars. The nuclear fusion in stars converts hydrogen into helium and is a continuous process in the stars until hydrogen runs out at the core of the star. When hydrogen runs out, helium atoms fuse to form carbon atoms. Massive stars can synthesize heavier elements such as
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
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).
Orion has two of the brightest stars, be Betelgeuse and Rigel. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant. The gravity of the star squeezes its core tightly, heating it to billions of degrees. It then fuses the helium to make heavier elements. When that happens, the star no longer produces energy in the core. Without the reactions in its core to push outward, gravity quickly causes the core to collapse, forming a neutron star.
A nebula contains dust and gas where gravity causes these to group together. Before the star is formed, the protostar will need to attain hydrostatic equilibrium by balancing the gravity getting atoms in and pushing heat and light out with radiation
Gravity pulls dust and gas together until it forms a ball. After a bit of time, the temperature rises from all the gas and dust bumping into each other under the great pressure of the surrounding material reaches around 15 million degrees. This is called a protostar, and it reaches a temperature of about 10 million Kelvins. This is where nuclear fusion occurs, and a star is born.
After approximately 10 billion years after the star is considered to be a main sequence star, the hydrogen at the center of the core is depleted. This causes the nuclear fusion which had been previously fueling the star to die out. Helium replaces the hydrogen in the core, and the inner core begins to shrink due to gravity. This process speeds up once all the hydrogen is completely used up. The radius of the star has increased
Stars go through phases with each one altering the star. They start as a protostar then ignite to
super-hot versions of Earth are created around other stars through the evaporation of their outer
The stars are born from gas and dust. Even the sun formed this way. Stars are also classified by color, temp., luminosity, and distance from the earth. Stars form inside a cloud of dust called a Nebula. Gravity pulls gas and dust closer together in some place of the Nebula. When the matter contracts, it forms a hot sphere. Did you know the color of the star is the effect of the temperature of the star. The sphere then becomes a star if the center grows hot and dense enough for fusion to happen. As you can see stars, like the sun, are born out of gas and dust that gets contracted.The different stages a star goes through depends on the mass of the star. Lower-mass stars develop
If the fusion reactions in the core start becoming too few, the start can collapse change the composition of the sun and reactions that happen inside of the sun. If the inner reactions’ pressure becomes more than the outside pressure then the start will explode. The star will become white and become a nova. This balance helps regulate the star, like if the fusion reactions started to decrease then the star would shrink, increase heat and pressure, and increase the fusion reactions. Unlike all these variables of a star, our star is perfectly balanced, at this moment
These stars usually lose their outer layers, which are mostly composed of hydrogen. As is known, many stars in our universe are binary star systems; binary star systems allow for the pair of stars to exchange mass and gravitationally affect one another. Because Wolf-Rayet stars are usually in binary systems, astronomers hypothesize that the star is growing because it is exchanging mass with the other star – essentially, it is gradually consuming the other star. Since the Wolf-Rayet star is surrounded by a large disk, it is possible that the Wolf-Rayet is forming a nebula (a disk) where star formation may occur, (5). The forming star now undergoes its own process of, as Voyobyov puts it, “cannibalism on astronomical scales,” (4). As observed with hydrodynamic simulations, “…gravitationally unstable disks can exhibit FU Orionis–type outbursts when fragments are driven onto the protostar…,” (2). In other words, more mass added to the disk that surrounds a forming star would make the disk unstable and cause fragmenting to occur. Hence, the fragments will most likely interact with the forming star causing these outbursts of energy (3). The outbursts of energy are caused by both of the reasons stated previously. According to astronomers, the one idea that has been ruled out, however, is that these stars are growing to the size of a Wolf-Rayet star solely by their stellar winds. In fact, their
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.