Sunday, September 18, 2011

What happens during the life cycle of a star with one stellar mass?

The stellar mass of a star will influence the life cycle of the star.|||First, the star will condense from around 500,000-1,000,000 tons of hydrogen. This usually happens in a nebula. Eventually, the pressure at the center of the mass will be enough to start fusion. Once that occurs, the star will take around 5-10 billion years to eat up all of its hydrogen fuel. When the fuel is gone, It will start expanding as it fuses helium, then beryllium, etc. all the way up to iron. The star will slowly lose all of its outer shell of gases and a nebula will form, creating a much smaller white dwarf. A white dwarf will slowly simmer for tens to hundreds of billions of years. Eventually, the white dwarf will just go out as it runs out of fusible fuel, leaving a large chunk of carbon and other larger elements in its place. Other stars might form from the nebula. There will probably be no supernova, this usually happens only with larger stars, and the star will definitely not collapse into a black hole. That takes hundreds of millions of tons of hydrogen in the beginning.

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