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“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” The Life Cycle of a Star: Nursery to Neverland Courtney Mutschler Geospace 355 http://www.writedesignonline.com/
“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”
The Life Cycle of a Star:Nursery to Neverland
Courtney MutschlerGeospace 355
http://www.writedesignonline.com/
How I Wonder What You Are…
• Space acts as a nursery full of the stuff needed to give birth to stars..– Gas– Dust
The Space Nursery provides both these materials in the clouds in the atmosphere of space!
Birth : ProtostarStars are born when
gravity pulls in the gas and dust in my Solar Nursery and begins to ShineShine!
When the cool masses of dust and gas combine, a star has a temperature of 1,800,000 degrees F!
http://www.virginmedia.com/images/
Way Above the World So High…
• The Life Span of a star depends on the type of star it is:– Giant blue Stars = 1 to 100 million
years– Yellow Star (the Sun) = 10 billion
years– Red dwarf Stars = 100 billion – 1
trillion years
Like a Diamond in the Sky…
Giant Red Star
During the stars “old age,”
the star swells into a giant
red star as its hydrogen
fuses into helium and burns other
fuels.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Betelgeuse_star_(Hubble).jpg
RIP Little Twinkle…
A star has 3 types
of death’s it could face, depending
on its size…
1. Small and Medium Stars
Black Dwarf: burned out white dwarf(lump of coal)
White Dwarf: Nuclear energy gone contractions
www.williamsclass.com/.../StellarEvolution.htm
library.thinkquest.org/.../blackdwarfs.html
2. Large Blue StarSupernova – a gigantic star
explosion, blasting away the stars outer shell, seen by us as a planetary nebula, while the core forms a
Neutron Star aka ‘Pulsar’ Star; a result of a gravitational collapse of a star after the outer shell has been blasted away.
www.megcabot.com
flickr.com
3. Massive Blue Stars
Black Hole: where the gravitational pull is so powerful nothing can escape its one-way surface!
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/ast110_06/bhaq/Black_Hole_Milkyway.jpg
Supernova – a gigantic star explosion, blasting away the stars outer shell, seen by us as a planetary nebula, while the core forms a
References:http://library.thinkquest.org/J0112787/
index.html
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/
