Quote:
Originally Posted by sitnspin
I spent a lot of time last summer understanding and plotting out HR (Hertzsprung-Russell) charts, which are actually pretty interesting. On the side of the graph you've got the star's luminosity, and on the bottom you've got its temperature (both things we can tell from a distance through analyzing its colour spectrum). When you plot a bunch of stars onto the diagram this way, you can see their relative ages and get an understanding of a star's lifecycle from protostar to either neutron star or white dwarf, depending on whether or not the star starts off as a yellow or blue main sequence.
And you know Moby's song "We Are All Made of Stars"? That's a fact. 98% of the matter that we're made of was generated in stars and expelled into the universe when they died.
|
Some stars that are very massive will go supernova type 2 rather than becoming a white dwarf or neutron star. The HR diagram is an awesome tool once you learn to use it. You can tell so much about a star. Its cool to know that when a start does go supernova, that the shockwave hits nebulas and causes the gasses and matter within them to compress together enough to start attracting more and more matter to them and thus the birth of a star. One supernova of a star can create litterally hundreds of new stars.