Stellar evolution

Laying on the fresh cut grass of your lawn, you watch the sun sink behind the mountains as day subtly fades into night. There is always a minute of darkness as the city holds its breath. No street lights. No cars. Just you and the sky and… the faint glow of a star. Seeing the first star that night, you make a wish and remember the first time you saw one. You still wonder what that speck of light is—How it got to be up there, why it sometimes is so bright and other times so faint, and how it plays an important role in the universe. The street light flickers on above your head, snapping you out of your reverie and reminding you that you still have an essay to write. You sigh, sit up, and walk to your house, the stars quickly forgotten. They wink from the sky and bid you goodnight, but you don’t notice. Just like you, people tilt their heads back to peer at the stars and think about how unlike us they are. Contrary to this belief, stars are more similar to the human race than a person might think. Each star is born, goes through its life cycle, and eventually dies, just like each and every person. If someone were to look at the sky at night and try to decipher the difference of stars with the naked eye, it would be impossible. All stars, from the vantage point of the Earth, seem to be small specks of light. Despite the eye’s inability to recognize the different stages and types of stars, there are more advanced ways to see into space: telescopes. Two of the major telescopes that…

Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russel developed a vital tool used to study stellar evolution, a scatter graph that plots a star’s spectral type respective to their absolute magnitude, which is the observational Hertzsprung-Russel Diagram, or the temperature of stars relative to its luminosity, the theoretical H-R diagram. Stars have specific evolutionary stages based on their initial mass, dictating its internal structure and means of energy production. The phases in stellar evolution…

Omega Centauri and Tarantula Nebula As opposed to the more short lived and less dense colonies of young stars that group up to create open clusters, globular clusters exist as far greater, spherical collections of aged stars that contain many low mass stars, sometimes numbering among the thousands. Globular clusters are more commonly found among a galaxy’s centre where the vast majority of stars are. It is thought that globular clusters arise from large gas clouds early in the creation of our…

developed her own classification signifying the comparison with Fleming's and Pickering work as difficulties arose when Pickering could not understand Maury's claim on theoretical concerns that inspired her scheme. This lead to Annie Jump Cannon to continue in 1911 to expand on her research she started in 1901 beginning with an examination of bright southern hemisphere stars using a magnifying loupe. She could distinguish stars down to 9th magnitude, about 16 times fainter than the human eye can…

Stage Four: Protostar By this stage of the stars evolution, 100,000 years after the process began, it can now be plotted on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which is used to compare the many different stars. Although it is still not fully formed, we are able to determine the type of star it will become based on its luminosity and temperature. In the nucleus of the condensed cloud, which could now fit within the orbit of Mercury at less than 58,000,000 km wide, electrons and protons are ripped…

Creation vs. Evolution Creation and evolution have always been argued head to head. Creationism and evolution, both cannot be proved scientifically yet. Creationism is common among people with a belief in God or another god/deity. They believe in the straightforward interpretation of the bible. Evolutionists though believe in what is the big bang theory which simply states that all things came from nothing. There are many other groups of people in these two major groups but they all have the…

happening spontaneously. Creationists say the earth was created by God in 6 days while evolutionists say that the creation of the earth and the life on it happened spontaneously. Both groups have valid reasons for the creation of the earth but there is no definitive answer or proof of how the Earth was created. “Evolutionism is the idea that the universe is the result of random cosmic accident. Life arose spontaneously via chance, Chemical process and all life forms are released and…

Dr. Nye made it abundantly clear that he was a man of faith in evidence, and from fossil records to fulfilled prediction made by science it appeared he held the upper hand on Dr. Ham in regard to the age of the earth. However, because that was not the topic of the debate he will not receive a reward for his stellar presentation. Dr. Nye believe that the two theories (creation/evolution) were mutually exclusive, one talked about the origin of life from the top on down(creation); while the other…

The word biodiversity is quite simple to understand, bio- life and diversity- variety. So, what? If one day you decide find out that all you can eat for the rest of your life is Cheetos. One day some freak accident occurs and the last Cheeto plant is destroyed and now you have nothing to eat. Sure, somehow you could evolve to eat something else, but evolution takes a lot of time (time you don’t have). If you ate things other than just Cheetos this would not impact you as much. This is an…

Mutations and errors in sexual reproduction allow for variation within a population. These variations can eventually lead to the complex process of evolution in a species. The genetically derived mutation Polycythemia and the environmentally derived mutation lip augmentations, affect human evolution in a beneficial and detrimental way. Evolution is change in the aspects of a certain species over a period of time. This is caused by mutations which are variations or differences in the genome. Both…