Neutron Stars
Guadalupe Zamudio
SMT 314-03
Professor Dawdy
October 26, 2016 The deaths of normal stars give birth to neutron stars. Neutron Stars are products of the so called supernova. Supernovae transpire during the death of a highly developed star which occurs when there is not enough nuclear fuel to keep the pressure intact inside the core of a star (Gursky 1975). The aftermath of a supernova is crucial because it frees iron, carbon, copper, and oxygen along with other elements found in a star. This explosion completely demolishes the star and has the ability to transform into either a black hole or neutron star (Freddy 2006). These supernovae are extremely bright and every 200 years there is an explosion that happens to be big enough and bright enough to be seen from earth. Neutron stars are very significant within the universe. It is said that the neutron star was discovered before the before the neutron. It was Lev Landau who first wrote about and studied dense stars. He focused his research on the idea there were objects in the universe that were denser than but as small as white dwarfs and regular stars (Haensel 2007). This focus leads to the discovery of the fascinating and complicated neutron star. The end is only the beginning for neutron stars.
The neutron star is composed of the combination of both electron and protons that will develop into purely neutrons, which make up the core (Astronomy 2016). The density of neutron stars is so
On the other end of the spectrum, the death of a super-massive star is one of the most brilliant displays of pure power in the universe which includes an amazing light show which has no equal. A super-massive star is exactly what it sounds like, a star so big that it dwarfs our own star in every way. When a super-massive sun begins to run out of out of hydrogen it begins to collapse, but due to its immense gravity and size, the collapse produces such an abrupt implosion that the last remnants of nuclear fusion remaining push all the mass of the star back out into space (Britt, 2007). This can be compared to someone jumping onto a trampoline whose elastic has enough elasticity to force one back into the air. This occurrence is known as a supernova explosion, which is the largest explosion in the known universe. A supernova explosion can even be seen from other galaxies, as scientists have done witnessed from observations using the Hubble telescope. The star is so big, however, that it only blows its outer atmosphere away, still leaving a massive amount of matter that is doomed to collapse again, and this time it will be a one-way ticket to oblivion. The super-massive star finally collapses and its own incredible mass crushes it’s internally and now turns it into a neutron star. An average neutron star is about ten miles in diameter, or the size of Manhattan. Although this
Stars like our Sun, which are no more than 1.44 solar masses, will undergo fusion of hydrogen into helium. Over its life time the star slowly uses its supply of hydrogen by fusing it into helium. These reactions require high temperatures. Eventually the star will completely fuse hydrogen into helium in its core leaving inadequate amounts of thermal pressure to balance gravity. This will cause the centre of the star to contract to compensate for the heat energy lost.
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.
Soon Mason felt he was ready, so he exploded! After Mason exploded into a supernova, his mass compressed him into a neutron star. Mason then lived a long and happy life as a neutron star, until one day. On one eventful day, a neighboring neutron star, named HeavenLea got a little too close to Mason and they started spinning very fast, pulled together by gravity. Until eventually, Mason and HeavenLea crashed, creating even more heat and pressure than a normal supernova! This crash resulted in some of the strongest elements like
Wolf-Rayet Stars – These massive stars are evolved and have completely lost their outer hydrogen, so they are fusing helium and heavy elements in their core.
The first process every star goes through before its end is the process of their core shrinking. When stars of at least .4 M begin to exhaust their hydrogen supply, the hydrogen starts to fuse in a shell that is outside the helium core. As the shell burns more hydrogen it is also producing more helium, this allows the core to increase in its mass and temperature. When the temperature increases greatly, helium fusion begins to start in what is called a helium flash, causing the star to rapidly decrease in its size and increase its temperature. Once the star has fused all of the helium out of its core, the product of the carbon will fuse which produces a hot core along with the outer shell made up of fusing helium. The more massive a star is,
We know of many stars that exist, but the main stars are White dwarfs, Pulsars, Neutron stars, Magnetars, Brown dwarfs, Black Holes, Cepheid Variable stars, Supergiants, Red Giants, Novas, and Quasars. Starting with White Dwarf, this star is usually the size of a planet and is last stage of a stars life, when it loses all its layers from the planetary nebula. This star is very dense and especially hot after it disables its nuclear fuel. It starts to cool done over the next billions of years. Pulsars, this star is practically a white dwarf star, but has electromagic ration beaming out of it. There are two steady lights (electromagic ration) that point in two opposite directions. It always seems to be blinking, but this is just from the motion
Remember the phrase “We are all star stuff”, we’ll it’s true. The matter and elements our bodies contain were made from a detonating star, which has additionally given us distinctive numbers planets and different stars. The blast of a star is known as a supernova (supernovae for plural employments). Supernovas are extremely intriguing, brilliant, and vital, for a hefty portion of reasons, however to start with, you'll need to comprehend what a supernova is.
Type I supernova: star accumulates matter from a nearby neighbour until a runaway nuclear reaction ignites.
Those stars in the night sky seem small and tiny, but up close they would be millions of times larger than the Earth. Stars are the most recognized astronomical objects and are the building blocks of the galaxies. These luminous spheres made of plasma are responsible for the creation of heavy elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. They were among the first objects in the early universe. Most of the elements found in the human body originated in stars, this means that we are literally made of stardust. When you are staring at stars from the night sky, you are actually looking back in time, the light you see could be from a million years ago. The study of the birth, life and death of stars are the central field of astronomy today.
Similar to white dwarfs, neutron stars formed when the original star cannot support themselves against gravitational collapse by generating thermal pressure. They are born from once large stars that grew to be four to eight times the size of our sun before exploding. After the explosion, the only part of the star that remains is its core, but it no longer produces nuclear fusion. The neutron star density causes protons and elections to combine into neutrons, which is how the star got its name. Neutron stars rotate in space when they are formed but as they compress and shrink, the speed of rotation increases. A form of neutron stars are called pulsars. Most neutron stars gradually slow down over time, but the ones that remain spinning emit radiation that cause the star to appear
Supernovas are the explosion of a star when it reaches the end of its life. There are two ways a star can go supernova. The first way or a Type I supernova occurs in the Binary system which is when two stars orbit the same point. The two stars are a white dwarf and a red giant. A white dwarf is a small dense star that is around the size of a planet and a red giant is a star at its last stages of life. If these two stars are close enough, matter will be transferred to the white dwarf from the red giant. When the star’s core reaches its limit of matter, a thermonuclear detonation will occur leaving nothing behind unless there were leftover elements in the white dwarf or there were elements made in the supernova explosion. One of the elements made in the explosion is radioactive nickel.
Neutron stars are a sight to witness on their own and we are fascinated by them in every way imaginable, including everything else in space, however, there is one sight that we have never seen before that includes such a star and, that being a neutron star merger. A merger being the collision of two stars, in this case two neutron stars, that create a black hole as well as an innumerable amount of energy however, scientists have determined that the amount of energy the merger exhibited was some 200 millions times that of our Sun but, in the form of gravitational waves. This collision had only just reached our small Earth a few days but, collided a few billion years ago some 130 million light years away from planet Earth. We managed to pick
Neutron stars are usually about 12.4 to 14.9 miles (20 to 24 kilometers) in diameter, but they can contain twice the mass of our sun which is about 864,938 miles (1.392 million km) in diameter. A sugar cube sized piece of a neutron star would weigh about 1 billion tons (0.9 metric tons) — "about the same as Mount Everest according to NASA. The gravitational pull on the surface of a neutron star would be about 1 billion times stronger than the gravitational pull on the surface of the
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.