Stellar Dawning
Coalescence
The early Universe was filled with roaming clouds of gas, namely hydrogen, and dust. In many cases, the ingredients for stars laid dormant for millions, perhaps billions of years until an event disturbed them ("Star birth", 2013). As Isaac Newton states in his first law of motion, “An object will stay at rest or travel at a constant velocity until acted on by a force,” and the same remains true even at the massive scales of the Universe. These clouds of gas and dust can be billions of miles across (Chinn, 2010b), and as such, require significant events to occur to displace them. The movements of galaxies and shock waves from supernova explosions are examples of events that can cause the gas and dust clouds to be …show more content…
As narrator Mike Rowe states in the How The Universe Works episode entitled Stars, “Giant stars live fast, burn bright, and die hard.” (Chinn, 2010b). The stars he is referring to can be one hundred or more masses of our Sun, their surface raging at a scalding temperature of 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and outputting hundreds of thousands of times more energy than the Sun. These stars, called hypergiants, will only live for a few million years. Conversely, the smallest stars, called red dwarfs, can be as little as one tenth the mass of our Sun, have surface temperatures of three to four thousand degrees Kelvin, and output only 0.01% the energy of the Sun. These stars can live for tens of billions, even trillions of years (“Stars”, n.d.). The size of the star determines how quickly the nuclear fusion reaction exhausts its …show more content…
The fusion process within a star is equivalent to one billion nuclear bombs going off every second, something that can continue for billions of years. At the birth of a star, it is gravity that sets off the fusion process, indicating that stars are massive because that is the gravitational threshold required to ignite the fusion process (Chinn, 2010b). This process works by fusing multiple nuclei of one element into a different element, in the case of a star, hydrogen and helium respectively. The article Stars & Brown Dwarfs (2013) explains how this process
Coalescence
The early Universe was filled with roaming clouds of gas, namely hydrogen, and dust. In many cases, the ingredients for stars laid dormant for millions, perhaps billions of years until an event disturbed them ("Star birth", 2013). As Isaac Newton states in his first law of motion, “An object will stay at rest or travel at a constant velocity until acted on by a force,” and the same remains true even at the massive scales of the Universe. These clouds of gas and dust can be billions of miles across (Chinn, 2010b), and as such, require significant events to occur to displace them. The movements of galaxies and shock waves from supernova explosions are examples of events that can cause the gas and dust clouds to be …show more content…
As narrator Mike Rowe states in the How The Universe Works episode entitled Stars, “Giant stars live fast, burn bright, and die hard.” (Chinn, 2010b). The stars he is referring to can be one hundred or more masses of our Sun, their surface raging at a scalding temperature of 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and outputting hundreds of thousands of times more energy than the Sun. These stars, called hypergiants, will only live for a few million years. Conversely, the smallest stars, called red dwarfs, can be as little as one tenth the mass of our Sun, have surface temperatures of three to four thousand degrees Kelvin, and output only 0.01% the energy of the Sun. These stars can live for tens of billions, even trillions of years (“Stars”, n.d.). The size of the star determines how quickly the nuclear fusion reaction exhausts its …show more content…
The fusion process within a star is equivalent to one billion nuclear bombs going off every second, something that can continue for billions of years. At the birth of a star, it is gravity that sets off the fusion process, indicating that stars are massive because that is the gravitational threshold required to ignite the fusion process (Chinn, 2010b). This process works by fusing multiple nuclei of one element into a different element, in the case of a star, hydrogen and helium respectively. The article Stars & Brown Dwarfs (2013) explains how this process