Tuesday, September 27, 2011

What is the difference between a dying star and a black hole?

What is the difference between a dying star and a black hole. No humour please? Thanks.|||A black hole will only form for stars that have a mass greater than or equal to approximately 25x the mass of our sun.





Let me back up a little.





Stars are basically a huge ball of gas that is burning at astronomically high temperatures. The only thing holding this giant bomb together is its own gravity: it is so massive that it holds itself together.





Eventually, though, enough of the star has burned up so that its mass drops enough so that the explosive force of the nuclear reactions push it outward - this is a supernova.





When stars are 25x more massive than our sun (or more), there is so much mass that all the mass collapses back in on itself, forming a black hole.





A dying star will never collapse back into a black hole; that is the essential difference.|||wow

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|||A matter of time|||a black hole may appear after a supernova - the collapse of a giant star.





a dying star is one that hasn't collapsed yet; hence DYING.|||the star will darken but the black hole will moan|||a black hole is a star that has imploded ...so it's dead already. However, I think that only some stars can become black holes, depending on how big they are.|||after a supermassive star dies it collapses on itself and either becomes a neutron star or a black hole but not all do (like the sun)some stars just die they turn into red giants,shoot of gas and shrink into white dwarfs and then cool until there just rocks like planets.|||A black hole is the result of a dying star. There are several ways stars can die. They can become novas or supernovas (basically explode, scattering elements into space and eventually contributing the the formations of nebulae, new stars, planets, etc.). Sometimesthey collapse in on themselves, and get compressed. If the star was heavy enough, it will compress so much it forms a black hole (since all that matter is crushed into a tiny space, the gravity is enormous).





A star has to be at least 3 times the size of the sun to be heavy enough to form a black hole, without help from outside factors.|||a dying star is just that, a dying star. it is running out of power and is slowly fading. most stars do not become black holes or neutron stars or quasars or crazy things like that.





a black hole is a whole different story (no pun intended lol). a black hole often results from massive star (known as "giants") having a violent death. the star has so much mass that while it is dying it loses its ability to support itself and collapses into itself. thins results in the formation of the singularity and hence the black hole. it's a lot more complex than that, but that's the basic idea.





but remember, most stars DO NOT become black holes. they usually just peter out and go away fairly quietly.|||Well it is important to note that in some sense, all stars are dying. The black hole is the last stage, before heat death, of a large star. The reason it is called a black hole is that the gravity of the object is so intense that light cannot make its escape velocity.





The life cycle of a star really does depend on how large a star is. A star the size of the sun will never become a black hole. Instead what will happen is that, in about five billion years, the mainstage cycle of the sun will end, as it runs out of hydrogen fuel for its fusion reactions. For a brief time, the Sun will switch to helium (for about a hundred million years.) During this time, the sun will grow larger and larger so that all the space between the Earth and the sun where you see it today will be entirely taken up by the red giant version of our sun.





When the sun runs out of helium it will collapse into a small white dwarf star. It will slowly deplete any remaining energy until it goes fully dark and cold in about twenty billion years. It will lack the mass to form a black hole, but may eventually get sucked into one, as the universe starts to go dark.





Larger stars - the ones that go black hole, end their red giant cycle by exploding. This is called a nova or supernova. What remains is a very dense object called a neutron star. If a neutron star is big enough, it will collapse into an even denser black hole.





The smaller a star is, the longer it will live. So smaller stars like ours go a long time, and then don't turn into a black hole.





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