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    Star Experiments

    Star Background

    Definition

    A star is a massive luminous celestial body of plasma and gas held together by gravity.

    Basics

    A star is a big ball of gas in outer space, made mostly of hydrogen and a little bit of helium plus other elements. The sun is such a star. In the center, the force of gravity is so intense that the temperatures are high enough for the atoms to "fuse" together, causing nuclear fusion. This energy slowly leaks out of the star (over a few hundred thousand years in the case of the sun), and by the time it gets to the surface most of this energy is in the form of visible light. Most stars look like shiny dots from Earth, because they are far away. Our Sun is the closest star to us. The earth moves around (orbits) the Sun in an oval shape. The Sun and all things that orbit it are called the Solar System. Many other stars sometimes have planets orbiting them too. Scientists have found other planets moving around other stars, but no planets that they have found are similar to Earth.

    The nearest star to our Solar System, and the second nearest star to Earth after the Sun, is Proxima Centauri. It is 39.9 trillion kilometres away. This is 4.2 light years away, meaning that light from Proxima Centauri takes 4.2 years to reach Earth.

    Astronomers think there are a very large number of stars in the Universe. They estimate (guess) that there are at least 70 sextillion stars. That is 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is about 230 billion times the amount of stars in the Milky Way (our galaxy).

    Most stars are very old. They are usually thought to be between 1 and 10 billion years old. The oldest stars are thought to be around 13.7 billion years old. Scientists think that is the age of the Universe.

    Some stars are small, and some stars are big. The smallest neutron stars (which are actually dead stars) are no bigger than a city. The neutron star is incredibly dense. If you were to take a layer a micron thick and apply it onto a tank, it would be a very tough armor. The tank would be so heavy, it would sink into the center of the Earth.Supergiant stars are the largest objects in the Universe. They have a diameter about 1,500 times bigger than the Sun. If you changed the sun into one of these supergiant stars down where the sun is, its outer surface would reach between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. The star Betelgeuse, in the Orion constellation is a red supergiant star.

    The light, heat, and other energy of stars comes from nuclear fusion -- a process of turning one chemical element into another one. Most stars are mostly made of hydrogen and helium. They turn the hydrogen into helium. (When a star is near the end of its life, it begins to change the helium into other chemical elements, like carbon and oxygen). Fusion produces a lot of energy. The energy makes the star very hot. The energy produced by stars radiates away from them. It is electromagnetic radiation. This is mostly visible light.

    When seen in the night sky without a telescope, some stars appear brighter than other stars. This difference is measured in terms of apparent magnitude. There are two reasons for stars to differ in apparent magnitude. If one star is much closer than another otherwise similar star, it will appear much brighter, in just the same way that a candle that is near looks brighter than a big fire that is far away. If one star is much larger or much hotter than another star at about the same distance, it will appear much brighter, in just the same way that if two fires are the same distance away, the bigger or hotter one will look brighter.

    Beside light, stars also give off a solar wind and neutrinos. These are very small particles.

    Stars are a source of a gravity field. This is what keeps planets close to them. It is also not unusual for two stars to orbit each other. This happens when they are close together. This is also because of gravity, in the same way as the Earth orbits the Sun. These binary stars (binary meaning "two") are thought to be very common. There are even groups of three or more stars orbiting each other. Proxima Centauri is the smallest star in a group of three.

    Stars are not spread evenly across all of space. They are grouped into galaxies. A typical galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars.

    People think that stars are made in nebulas. These are big areas of slightly higher density than normal space.

    When very big stars die, they explode. This is called a supernova. When a supernova happens in a nebula, it becomes unstable. This makes parts of the nebula collapse. Stars form in these collapsed areas. The Orion Nebula is an example of a place where stars form.

    Stars spend about 90% of their lives fusing hydrogen to produce helium in high pressure reactions near the core. Such stars are said to be on the main sequence.

    Small stars (called red dwarfs) burn their fuel very slowly and might last tens to hundreds of billions of years. At the end of their lives, they become dimmer and dimmer.

    Because most stars use up their supply of hydrogen, their outer layers expand and cool to form a red giant. (Astrophysicists think that in about 5 billion years, when the sun is a red giant.) Eventually the core is compressed enough to start helium fusion, and the star heats up and contracts. (Larger stars will also fuse heavier elements, all the way to iron.)

    An average-size star will then shed its outer layers as a "planetary nebula". The core that remains will be a tiny ball of degenerate matter, not heavy enough for further fusion to take place, supported only by its own pressure, called a white dwarf. It will fade into a black dwarf over very, very long stretches of time.

    In larger stars, fusion continues until collapse ends up causing the star to explode in a supernova. This is the only cosmic process that happens on human timescales; historically, supernovae have been observed as "new stars" where none existed before. Most of the matter in a star is blown away in the explosion (forming nebulae such as the Crab Nebula) but what remains will collapse into a neutron star (a pulsar or X-ray burster) or, in the case of the largest stars, a black hole.

    The blown-off outer layers includes heavy elements, which are often converted into new stars and/or planets. The flowing out of the gas from supernovae and the stellar wind of large stars play an important part in shaping the interstellar medium.

    Topics of Interest

    A star is a massive, luminous ball of plasma that is held together by gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth. Other stars are visible in the night sky, when they are not outshone by the Sun. Historically, the most prominent stars on the celestial sphere were grouped together into constellations, and the brightest stars gained proper names. Extensive catalogues of stars have been assembled by astronomers, which provide standardized star designations.

    For most of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion in its core releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Almost all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were created by fusion processes in stars. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, chemical composition and many other properties of a star by observing its spectrum, luminosity and motion through space. The total mass of a star is the principal determinant in its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star are determined by its evolutionary history, including the diameter, rotation, movement and temperature. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities, known as a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (H–R diagram), allows the age and evolutionary state of a star to be determined.

    A star begins as a collapsing cloud of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium and trace amounts of heavier elements. Once the stellar core is sufficiently dense, some of the hydrogen is steadily converted into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. The remainder of the star's interior carries energy away from the core through a combination of radiative and convective processes. The star's internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity. Once the hydrogen fuel at the core is exhausted, those stars having at least 0.4 times the mass of the Sun expand to become a red giant, in some cases fusing heavier elements at the core or in shells around the core. The star then evolves into a degenerate form, recycling a portion of the matter into the interstellar environment, where it will form a new generation of stars with a higher proportion of heavy elements.

    Stellar evolution is the process by which a star undergoes a sequence of radical changes during its lifetime. Depending on the mass of the star, this lifetime ranges from only a few million years (for the most massive) to trillions of years (for the least massive), considerably more than the age of the universe.

    Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single star, as most stellar changes occur too slowly to be detected, even over many centuries. Instead, astrophysicists come to understand how stars evolve by observing numerous stars at the various points in their life, and by simulating stellar structure with computer models.

    Binary and multi-star systems consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound, and generally move around each other in stable orbits. When two such stars have a relatively close orbit, their gravitational interaction can have a significant impact on their evolution. Stars can form part of a much larger gravitationally bound structure, such as a cluster or a galaxy.

    Designations of stars (and other celestial bodies) are done by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Many of the star names in use today were inherited from the time before the IAU existed. Other names, mainly for variable stars (including novae and supernovae), are being added all the time. Most stars, however, have no name and are referred to, if at all, by means of catalogue numbers. This article briefly surveys some of the methods used to designate stars.

    The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the body officially recognized by astronomers and other scientists worldwide as the naming authority for astronomical bodies. In response to the need for unambiguous names for astronomical objects, it has created a number of systematic naming systems for bodies of various sorts.

    A star catalogue, or star catalog, is an astronomical catalogue that lists stars. In astronomy, many stars are referred to simply by catalogue numbers. There are a great many different star catalogues which have been produced for different purposes over the years, and this article covers only some of the more frequently quoted ones. Star catalogues were compiled by many different ancient peoples, including the Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Persians and Arabs. Most modern catalogues are available in electronic format and can be freely downloaded from NASA's Astronomical Data Center.

    Star formation is the process by which dense parts of molecular clouds collapse into a ball of plasma to form a star. As a branch of astronomy star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to the star formation process and the study of young stellar objects and planet formation as its immediate products. Star formation theory, as well as accounting for the formation of a single star, must also account for the statistics of binary stars and the initial mass function.

    The main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appear on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell. Stars on this band are known as main-sequence stars or "dwarf" stars.

    In astronomy and physical cosmology, the metallicity of an object is the proportion of its matter made up of chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium. Since stars, which comprise most of the visible matter in the universe, are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, astronomers, for convenience's sake, use the blanket term "metal" to describe all other elements collectively. Thus, a nebula rich in carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and neon would be "metal rich" in astrophysical terms even though those elements are nonmetals in conventional chemistry. This term should not be confused with the usual definition of "metal"; metallic bonds are impossible within stars, and the very strongest chemical bonds are only possible in the outer layers of cool K and M stars. Normal chemistry therefore has little or no relevance in stellar interiors.

    Stellar kinematics is the study of the movement of stars without needing to understand how they acquired their motion. This differs from stellar dynamics, which takes into account gravitational effects. The motion of a star relative to the Sun can provide useful information about the origin and age of a star, as well as the structure and evolution of the surrounding galaxy.

    A stellar magnetic field is a magnetic field generated by the motion of conductive plasma inside a main sequence (hydrogen-burning) star. This motion is created through convection, which is a form of energy transport involving the physical movement of material. A localized magnetic field exerts a force on the plasma, effectively increasing the pressure without a comparable gain in density. As a result the magnetized region rises relative to the remainder of the plasma, until it reaches the star's photosphere. This creates starspots on the surface, and the related phenomenon of coronal loops.

    Stellar rotation is the angular motion of a star about its axis. The rate of rotation can be measured from the spectrum of the star, or by timing the movements of active features on the surface.

    The apparent magnitude (m) of a celestial body is a measure of its brightness as seen by an observer on Earth, normalized to the value it would have in the absence of the atmosphere. The brighter the object appears, the lower the value of its magnitude.

    In astronomy, absolute magnitude (also known as absolute visual magnitude when measured in the standard V phometric band) measures a celestial object's intrinsic brightness. To derive absolute magnitude from the observed apparent magnitude of a celestial object its value is corrected from distance to its observer. The absolute magnitude then equals the apparent magnitude an object would have if it were at a standard luminosity distance (10 parsecs, or 1 AU, depending on object type) away from the observer, in the absence of astronomical extinction. It allows the true brightnesses of objects to be compared without regard to distance. Bolometric magnitude is luminosity expressed in magnitude units; it takes into account energy radiated at all wavelengths, whether observed or not.

    In astronomy, stellar classification is a classification of stars based on its spectral characteristics. The spectral class of a star is a designated class of a star describing the ionization of its chromosphere, what atomic excitations are most prominent in the light, giving an objective measure of the temperature in this chromosphere. Light from the star is analysed by splitting it up by a diffraction grating, subdividing the incoming photons into a spectrum exhibiting a rainbow of colors interspersed by absorption lines, each line indicating a certain ion of a certain chemical element. The presence of a certain chemical element in such an absorption spectrum primarily indicates that the temperature conditions is suitable for a certain excitation of this element. If the star temperature have been determined by a majority of absorption lines, unusual absences or strengths of lines for a certain element may indicate an unusual chemical composition of the chromosphere.

    A star is classified as variable if its apparent brightness as seen from Earth changes over time, whether the changes are due to variations in the star's actual luminosity, or to variations in the amount of the star's light that is blocked from reaching Earth. Many, possibly most, stars have at least some variation in luminosity: the energy output of our Sun, for example, varies by about 0.1% over an 11 year solar cycle, equivalent to a change of one thousandth of a magnitude. Astronomers use the term millimagnitude, abbreviated as mmag, for one thousandth of a magnitude.

    Stars of different mass and age have varying internal structures. Stellar structure models describe the internal structure of a star in detail and make detailed predictions about the luminosity, the color and the future evolution of the star.

    Stellar nucleosynthesis is the collective term for the nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the elements heavier than hydrogen. Some small quantity of these reactions also occur on the stellar surface under various circumstances.

    In modern astronomy, a constellation is an area of the celestial sphere, defined by exact boundaries. The term "constellation" can also be used loosely to refer to just the more prominent visible stars that seem to form a pattern in that area.

    Blue stragglers (BSS) are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. Thus, they are separate from other stars on the cluster's Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Blue stragglers appear to violate standard theories of stellar evolution, which holds that stars formed at the same time in a cluster should lie along a clearly defined curve in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, with their positions on that curve determined solely by their initial mass. Since blue stragglers often lie well off this curve, they may undergo atypical stellar evolution.

    The luminosity class II in the Yerkes spectral classification is given to bright giants. These are stars which straddle the boundary between giants and supergiants, and the classification is in general given to giant stars with exceptionally high luminosity, but which are not sufficiently bright or massive to be classified as supergiants.

    A carbon star is a late type giant star similar to a red giant (or occasionally to a red dwarf) whose atmosphere contains more carbon than oxygen; the two elements combine in the upper layers of the star, forming carbon monoxide, which consumes all the oxygen in the atmosphere, leaving carbon atoms free to form other carbon compounds, giving the star a "sooty" atmosphere and a strikingly red appearance.

    A giant star is a star with substantially larger radius and luminosity than a main sequence star of the same surface temperature. Typically, giant stars have radii between 10 and 100 solar radii and luminosities between 10 and 1,000 times that of the Sun.

    A hypergiant (luminosity class 0) is a star with a tremendous mass and luminosity, showing signs of a very high rate of mass loss.

    According to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a red dwarf star is a small and relatively cool star, of the main sequence, either late K or M spectral type. They constitute the vast majority of stars and have a mass of less than one-half of that of the Sun (down to about 0.075 solar masses, which are brown dwarfs) and a surface temperature of less than 3,500 K.

    A red giant is a luminous giant star of low or intermediate mass (roughly 0.5–10 solar masses) in a late phase of stellar evolution. The outer atmosphere is inflated and tenuous, making the radius immense and the surface temperature low, somewhere from 5,000 K and lower. The appearance of the red giant is from yellow orange to red, including the spectral types K and M, but also class S stars and most carbon stars.

    According to the general theory of relativity, a black hole is a region of space from which nothing, including light, can escape. It is the result of the deformation of spacetime caused by a very compact mass. Around a black hole there is an undetectable surface which marks the point of no return, called an event horizon. It is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that comes towards it, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect black body in thermodynamics. Under the theory of quantum mechanics black holes possess a temperature and emit Hawking radiation.

    Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar objects with a mass below that necessary to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, as do stars on the main sequence, but which have fully convective surfaces and interiors, with no chemical differentiation by depth. Brown dwarfs occupy the mass range between that of large gas giant planets and the lowest mass stars; this upper limit is between 75 and 80 Jupiter masses (MJ).

    Hypernova (pl. hypernovae) refers to an exceptionally large star that collapses at the end of its lifespan — for example, a collapsar, or a large supernova. Until the 1990s, it referred specifically to an explosion with an energy of over 100 supernovae (1046 joules); such explosions were proposed to explain the origin of exceptionally bright gamma ray bursts. An extensive sky search found several apparent hypernova remnants, but too few to support the hypothesis.

    A neutron star is a type of remnant that can result from the gravitational collapse of a massive star during a Type II, Type Ib or Type Ic supernova event. Such stars are composed almost entirely of neutrons, which are subatomic particles without electrical charge and roughly the same mass as protons. Neutron stars are very hot and are supported against further collapse because of the Pauli exclusion principle. This principle states that no two neutrons (or any other fermionic particle) can occupy the same place and quantum state simultaneously.

    A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a small star composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. They are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth. Its faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored thermal energy. White dwarfs comprise roughly 6% of all known stars in the solar neighborhood. The unusual faintness of white dwarfs was first recognized in 1910 by Henry Norris Russell, Edward Charles Pickering, and Williamina Fleming; the name white dwarf was coined by Willem Luyten in 1922.

    A star clock is a method of using the stars to determine the time. Some methods require no tools; others use an astrolabe and a planisphere.

    Celestial navigation, also known as astronavigation, is a position fixing technique that was devised to help sailors cross the featureless oceans without having to rely on dead reckoning to enable them to strike land. Celestial navigation uses angular measurements (sights) between common celestial objects or to the horizon. The Sun and the horizon are most often measured. Skilled navigators can use the Moon, planets or one of 57 navigational stars whose coordinates are tabulated in nautical almanacs.

    Several stars have played important role in the ancient and medieval astrology.

    The planetary systems of stars other than the Sun and its Solar System are a staple element in much science fiction.

    Source: Wikipedia (All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

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