Abstract
Now that we have the tiny world of elementary particles in hand, we return to the big universe. At this point, we will examine the most common cosmic objects, stars. Our Sun is a typical star, and we have learned many facts about stars by studying the Sun. But there are many different kinds of stars, some very different from the Sun, like red giant stars, white dwarfs and neutron stars. In fact, those very differences have helped us to understand the structure of the stars and the physics determining their life cycle.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time this was not so clear and the topic caused interesting debates in the meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society between Eddington and James Jeans (1877–1946), the leading English theoretical astronomer of the time. In the end, Eddington was right, even though many details of stellar evolution remained unclear to him.
- 2.
With the rate a star uses its fuel (energy output/sec) being proportional to a star’s mass to the fourth power and the amount of fuel proportional to its mass, the MS lifetime for a star ten times the solar mass is only 1/1000 as long as our Sun’s life.
- 3.
Hill came from a line of London and Cambridge physiologists: Hill’s supervisor was John Langley (1852–1925) who was the student of Sir Michael Foster (1836–1907). Foster had studied physiology under Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin’s disciple.
- 4.
Astronomers have identified clouds of gas flying away from hot cores that are the initial stages of the formation of a white dwarf star. These “planetary nebulae” looked a bit like a planet’s disk when seen through early not-so-good telescopes.
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Teerikorpi, P., Valtonen, M., Lehto, K., Lehto, H., Byrd, G., Chernin, A. (2019). Stars: Cosmic Fusion Reactors. In: The Evolving Universe and the Origin of Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17921-2_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17921-2_19
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