The luminosity of Spica is about 5x1030 Joules/second. A mass MH of Hydrogen that undergoes thermonuclear reactions generates E=0.007 MH c2 Joules of energy, where c is the speed of light (in m/s) and MH is in kg. How many kgs of Hydrogen is Spica “burning” per second to produce that luminosity?
Stellar evolution
We may see thousands of stars in the dark sky. Our universe consists of billions of stars. Stars may appear tiny to us but they are huge balls of gasses. Sun is a star of average size. Some stars are even a thousand times larger than the sun. The stars do not exist forever they have a certain lifetime. The life span of the sun is about 10 billion years. The star undergoes various changes during its lifetime, this process is called stellar evolution. The structure of the sun-like star is shown below.
Red Shift
It is an astronomical phenomenon. In this phenomenon, increase in wavelength with corresponding decrease in photon energy and frequency of radiation of light. It is the displacement of spectrum of any kind of astronomical object to the longer wavelengths (red) side.
The luminosity of Spica is about 5x1030 Joules/second. A mass MH of Hydrogen that undergoes thermonuclear reactions generates E=0.007 MH c2 Joules of energy, where c is the speed of light (in m/s) and MH is in kg.
How many kgs of Hydrogen is Spica “burning” per second to produce that luminosity?
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