essay on stellar evolution

When the Universe came into existence ~14 billion years ago, the only elements were hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium, beryllium, and boron. The heavier elements did not yet exist. Heavy elements are produced by nucleosysthesis - the fusion of nuclei deep within the cores of stars. At some point in time, the first stars were formed, and within their cores the fusion process created heavier and heavier elements; the most massive stars produced nuclei as heavy as iron. When the stars used up their nuclear fuel, they started to evolve. The evolutionary processes of stars depend upon their initial mass. Mid-sized stars eject planetary nebulae, leaving a white dwarf core remnant. More massive stars explode as supernovae, leaving neutron stars or black holes at the centers of the supernovae remnants. The elements that were created within the

cores of the first stars were ejected into space where they intermingled with the surrounding interstellar medium. This medium — the gas and dust between the stars — provides the raw material for the formation of new generations of stars. Eventually, these elements became incorporated into large clouds of gas and dust that condensed and formed protostars. And so the cycle of stellar formation and destruction continues. Each new generation further enriches the interstellar medium with heavy elements that become incorporated into the next generation. We are just beginning to understand stellar formation and destruction —and how the Sun, Solar System and life on Earth are connected to this never-ending cycle.

The Milky Way galaxy contains several hundred billion stars of various ages, sizes and masses. A star forms when a dense cloud of gas collapses until nuclear reactions begin deep in the interior of the cloud and provide enough energy to halt the collapse. Many factors influence the rate of evolution, the evolutionary path and the nature of the final remnant. By far the most important of these is the initial mass of the star. This interactive piece illustrates in a general way how stars of different masses evolve and whether the final remnant will be a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole.

Stellar evolution gets even more complicated when the star has a nearby companion. For example, excessive mass transfer from a companion star to a white dwarf may cause the white dwarf to explode as a Type la supernova.

The following tableau provides a few examples of stars at various evolutionary stages, and what Chandra has learned about them. X-ray data reveal extreme or violent conditions where gas has been heated to very high temperatures or particles have been accelerated to extremely high energies. These conditions can exist near collapsed objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes; in giant bubbles of hot gas produced by supernovas; in stellar wind or in the hot, rarified outer layers, or coronas, of normal stars.

Q: When will the next supernova explosion be?

A: It's not possible to predict when the next supernova explosion will be, but you don't have to wait very long. Throughout the Universe, countless supernova explosions happen every day. In our own galaxy, there probably hasn't been a supernova explosion for hundreds of years. Astronomers have identified several large, unstable stars in our galaxy that might be the next to explode, but they can only guess when such an explosion might happen. In distant galaxies where individual stars cannot be seen, it's obviously even harder to make predictions.

Q: Why do neutron stars have strong magnetic fields?

A: Neutron Star Illustration A neutron star is formed when a massive star collapses - if the star has a magnetic field of approximately the strength of the Sun's magnetic field (a few gauss), the magnetic field is compressed when it collapses and the field is amplified by the ratio of the volumes (again approximately), which is 1.25 x 1014. Please see this page for details: http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/ask/a11654.html The Chandra pages have a plethora of information on neutron stars and stellar evolution. We suggest you start here: http://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/formal/stellar_ev/story/index.html and note that pages 11 and 12 of this section contain the neutron star information, although the entire section will help you understand the process of stellar birth and death.

Q: What are five differences between white dwarfs and neutron stars?

• White dwarfs are formed from the collapse of low mass stars, less than about 10 time the mass of the Sun, in which the star loses most of its mass in a wind, leaving behind a core that is less than 1.44 solar mass, whereas neutron stars are formed in the catastrophic collapse of the core of a massive star.
• A white dwarf is supported by electron degeneracy pressure, a neutron star by neutron degeneracy pressure
• A white dwarf has a larger radius --about 600 times
• A neutron star has a stronger gravitational field -about 400,000 times
• Neutron stars have higher temperatures at birth, spin faster, and have stronger magnetic fields, among other things

Q: Where in the galaxy would you expect to find Type I and Type II supernovas?

A: The two basic types of supernovas are Type Ia and Type II. Other types, such as Types Ib and Ic, are unusual supernovas that have most of the properties of type II supernovas. Type Ia are believed to be triggered by a large transfer of mass from a companion star onto a white dwarf that pushes the white dwarf over the Chandrasekhar limit. A thermonuclear explosion follows, blowing the entire star apart, and sending material rich in iron and other products of the explosion rushing out into space. Since a white dwarf is involved, Type Ia supernovas are expected to be found among old star systems, such as globular clusters, the central bulges of galaxies and elliptical galaxies. Type II supernovas are thought to result from the collapse of a massive star (ten or more times as massive as the Sun) that has reached the end of the red giant stage of evolution, and formed an iron core. The core collapses under the weight of the outer layers of the star. A neutron star is formed, lots of neutrinos and other radiation is emitted, and everything except the neutron star is blown away. Since massive stars are involved, Type II supernovas are found in the spiral arms and other star-forming regions of spiral and disk galaxies, which have lots of gas and dust for the formation of new stars.

Stellar Nursery: Large cold clouds of dust and gas where stars form.

Protostars: The stage in the formation of a star just before nuclear reactions ignite.

Brown Dwarf: An object with a mass less than about 8% of the mass of the Sun, but about 10 times greater than that of Jupiter.

Red Dwarf: A star with a mass between about 8% and 50% the mass of the Sun.

Sun-Like STAR: A star with mass between about 50% and 10 times that of the Sun.

Blue Supergiants: Stars much more massive than the Sun.

Red Giant: A phase in the evolution of a star after nuclear fusion reactions that convert hydrogen to helium have consumed all the hydrogen in the core of the star, and energy generated by hydrogen fusion in the shell causes the star’s diameter to greatly expand and cool.

Blue Giant: After a massive red giant star ejects its outer layers, its hot inner core is exposed, and it becomes a blue giant star.

Planetary Nebula: A nebula produced after an exhausted giant star puffs off its outer layer and leaves behind a smaller, hot star.

White Dwarf: The end phase of a Sun-like star in which all the material contained in the star, minus the amount blown off in the red giant phase, is packed into a volume one millionth the size of the original star.

Neutron Star: An extremely compact star produced by the collapse of the core of a massive star in the supernova process.

Blackholes: If the core of a collapsing star has a mass that is greater than three Suns, no known force can prevent it from forming a black hole.

Type Ia Supernova: An explosion produced when a white dwarf becomes unstable due to the accretion of too much material or merger with another white dwarf.

Type II Supernova: A supernova that occurs when a massive star has used up its nuclear fuel and its core collapses to form either a neutron star or a black hole, triggering an explosion.

Pair-instability Supernova: A rare type of explosion predicted to occur as a consequence of the extremely high temperatures in the interiors of stars having masses of about 200 suns.

Supershells: The combined activity of many stellar winds and supernovas create expanding supershells that can trigger the collapse of clouds of dust and gas to form new generations of stars.

End phases: A star’s ultimate fate depends on its mass. It can fade into obscurity (brown dwarf or red dwarf), become a white dwarf (sun-like stars), explode as a supernova and leave behind a neutron star or a black hole (massive to very massive stars), or be disrupted entirely (white dwarfs in close binary systems, or extremely massive stars).

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Stellar Evolution Essay

Introduction, works cited.

Stars are interesting components in the universe and although it is not easy for a layman to comprehend their existence, research carried out in this field has helped us know much about stars.

One of the discoveries is that a star undergoes a lifetime just like any other living organism (e.g., the human beings); stars are born, they undergo some processes while living or existing and they eventually die.

A star’s lifespan is however affected by various aspects the major determinant is its mass. Pressure, temperature, and gravity also play a role in the life span of the stars.

Stellar evolution entails a progression (which involves some notable changes) through which a star undertakes in its entire lifetime. Stars have got varying lifetimes depending on their masses where the more massive the star, the lesser the lifetime and vice versa.

The study of stellar evolution is complicated since it is not easy to note the life of a particular star since the changes take place slowly hence necessitating the study of various stars at different stages in life at a go (Night Sky Observer 4). This essay looks into the process of stellar evolution and the factors that influence it.

Stars are believed to originate from molecular clouds as well as the dense clouds of gas. A star forms from a big cool mass of gas that arises from the collapse of the dense regions contained in the clouds (Delehanty 1).

There are usually some contractions of the gases that form the star with a successive increase in temperatures. The nuclear reaction then happens where hydrogen atoms and hydrogen deuterons combine to form helium generating a lot of energy and preventing any other contraction of the star.

The star is known as the main sequence star the moment it commences nuclear fusion.

The star reaches the end of its main sequence lifetime once it reaches a point where approximately half of its core fuel is exhausted and hence making it difficult for the star to carry on a hydrogen fusion reaction.

The death of a star is determined by its type and mass, for instance, when a less massive star exhausts its hydrogen supply, the heat to support its core against the force of gravity is no more leading to the collapse of the core to allow for the density that can support conversion of helium to carbon.

Massive stars, on the other hand, tend to burn brighter and die much more radically. The lower the mass of a star, the longer the time it will live and the less violent its death and the higher the mass of a star, the shorter it lives and the more violently it dies.

Some of the factors that influence the evolution of a particular star include the chemical composition in the cloud that forms the star and the quantity of the components in the cloud which undergoes condensation to form the specific star.

The temperature within the core of a star also determines its destiny. The mass of the star is, however, the most essential and influential factor that determines its lifetime especially when other factors are kept to a constant.

More massive stars are deemed to shine much brighter and to burn out the supply of nuclear energy in their core much faster as compared to the lighter stars. The larger a star is the more fuel it has to burn and the shorter the life spans and vice versa (Newman 11).

In a nutshell, a star goes through various stages in its entire lifetime highlighted as follows; the nebula which entails the clouds forming the star, the protostar, the main sequence, the actual life span, the giant and lastly old age (King 1).

Delehanty, Marc. “Stellar Evolution, the lives of stars.” Astronomy today , 2000.

King, Tom. “Stages in the Life Cycle of a Star.” Ehow , 1999.

Newman, Phil et al. “What Is a Star?” NASA , 2010.

Night Sky Observer. “New View of Family Life in the North American Nebula.” Night Sky Observer , 2011.

• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2022, August 18). Stellar Evolution. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stellar-evolution/

"Stellar Evolution." IvyPanda , 18 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/stellar-evolution/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Stellar Evolution'. 18 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Stellar Evolution." August 18, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stellar-evolution/.

1. IvyPanda . "Stellar Evolution." August 18, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stellar-evolution/.

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IvyPanda . "Stellar Evolution." August 18, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/stellar-evolution/.

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Stellar Structure and Evolution

Stars are the source of almost all of the light our eyes see in the sky. Nuclear fusion is what makes a star what it is: the creation of new atomic nuclei within the star’s core. Many of stars’ properties — how long they live, what color they appear, how they die — are largely determined by how massive they are. The study of stellar structure and evolution is dedicated to understanding how stars change over their lifetimes, including the processes that shape them on the inside.

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian researchers study stellar structure and evolution in many ways:

Studying fluctuations in light on nearby stars to determine their internal processes. While most stars appear too small to distinguish surface features, astronomers can infer variations in their interiors by how their light fluctuates. Those changes are due to “ starspots ” — dark spots created by magnetic variations in a star — and starquakes. For example, astronomers recently discovered that Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, has starspots. That discovery was surprising, because researchers previously thought red dwarf stars like Proxima Centauri don’t have strong magnetic fluctuations. Proxima Centauri Might Be More Sunlike Than We Thought

Monitoring sound waves running through the interiors of Sun-like stars. These starquakes produce variations in the star’s light. Much like earthquakes provide hints about Earth’s, these sound waves allow astronomers to measure what’s going on inside stars. Using NASA’s Kepler observatory and other telescopes monitoring stars for exoplanet signals, researchers measure the fluctuations of light caused by starquakes. Solar-Like Oscillations in Other Stars

Studying stars that are similar to the Sun at other stages in evolution. We can only observe our Sun at this particular time of its life, but astronomers can see its past and future by looking at similar stars earlier or later in their cycle. Astronomers observe newly born Sun-like stars to determine what ours may have been like, and the effect that had on planet formation. Young Sun-like Star Shows a Magnetic Field Was Critical for Life on the Early Earth

Observing stars in the final stages of their lives. These giant stars pulsate and shed huge amounts of matter. Studying them reveals how they enrich interstellar space with new atoms, and how pulsation relates to physical processes deep in the star’s interior. Using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other observatories, astronomers can identify the composition of the “winds” from aging stars. Pulsation-Driven Winds in Giant Stars

Identifying stars at all stages of life — including places where both dying and newborn stars coexist. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, astronomers have learned that the violent final stages of a star’s life can spur the creation of new stars, by compressing interstellar gas until it collapses under its own gravity to make protostars. In other instances, X-ray light from a binary system with a black hole or neutron star illuminates a star-forming region, which is opaque to visible light, but transparent to X-rays. A Stellar Circle of Life

Measuring the ages of stars to understand how they change over the course of their lives. Stars begin their lives spinning fast, and slow down gradually over time. Researchers want to know exactly how that rate changes, and how it reflects the aging of the star itself. Using NASA’s Kepler observatory and other instruments, astronomers have tracked starspots to measure the spinning of stars in a single cluster . Stars' Spins Reveal Their Ages  

Studying YSOs and their environments, as a way to determine how stars have the masses they do. The mass of a star dictates its life cycle, and that mass is set during its growth period before it’s even a star. Using the CfA’s Submillimeter Array (SMA) and other telescopes capable of seeing through the gas and dust around newborn stars, astronomers can track the evolution from protostar to star. SMA Unveils How Small Cosmic Seeds Grow Into Big Stars

This NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory image reveals two large sunspot groups on the surface of the Sun. Sunspots and starspots are produced by magnetic activity, providing information about the internal structure of stars.

A Star Is Born

All stars begin their lives in dense interstellar clouds of gas and dust . Even before they become stars, though, much of their future life and structure is determined by the way they form.

A star is defined by nuclear fusion in its core. Before fusion begins, an object that will become a star is known as a young stellar object (YSO), and it passes through two major stages of development.

During the protostar phase, the YSO is still gathering mass onto itself in the form of gas and dust. Protostars are completely hidden in visible light, so all the information we have about them comes from infrared, submillimeter, and X-ray observations. The protostar’s gravity gathers mass into a spinning circumstellar disk, and some of the matter is funneled into powerful jets shooting away from the YSO. These processes help determine the mass of the eventual star, and as such dictate much of the rest of the star’s life.

During the pre-main-sequence (PMS) phase, the YSO contracts and heats up. New planets form out of the remains of the circumstellar disk. The specific way the YSO behaves depends on how much mass it gathers. Lower mass stars like the Sun pass through a stage of wild fluctuations as they lose their shrouds of gas and dust, during which they are called “T Tauri stars”. Higher mass PMS stars produce huge amounts of radiation, which can drive the surrounding gas away. This can throttle the formation of other stars, either preventing them from forming or keeping them at lower masses.

The jets and outflows of particles from YSOs can have a profound influence on the surrounding nebula. Since many stars form in a cluster from the same pool of gas and dust, they affect each other’s growth and development in profound ways.

All About Mass

Once YSOs have contracted and heated enough, fusion of hydrogen into helium begins in their cores and they become main sequence stars. The rate of that fusion increases with the mass of the star, so the most massive stars are the shortest-lived. 

The lowest-mass stars are known as red dwarfs or M dwarfs. These experience convection — the circulation of matter — throughout their interior. That means they burn for a very long time, giving them lifetimes much longer than the 13.8 billion years the universe has been around. None of these stars have lived through their entire lifecycle yet.

The Sun is a moderate mass star with a lifetime of roughly 10 billion years; we’re currently about halfway through the Sun’s main sequence. Stars in this middle range of mass have a distinct core where fusion takes place, and that limits the available supply of hydrogen to fuse into helium. Once that supply is exhausted, the star leaves the main sequence and swells into a red giant. The core then collapses slightly as it begins fusing helium into carbon and oxygen. Once the available helium supply is used up, the star sheds its outer layers , exposing the remnant of its core. This remnant is a white dwarf .

The highest mass stars consume their available hydrogen even more quickly, passing through the main sequence and helium-fusion phase in a much shorter amount of time. However, these stars have enough mass to keep fusion going, producing heavier elements up to iron. Elements beyond iron on the periodic table require more energy to fuse than is released by the fusion process, so the core of these stars can’t keep up the work. The core collapses under gravity, and the outer layers of the star are blown off in a supernova explosion. For the most massive stars, the cores collapse into black holes ; the slightly less massive stars leave behind neutron stars .

Aging Stars

During the post-main-sequence evolution when stars grow huge, they may also pulsate in and out due to instabilities in the outer layers of the stellar envelope. These pulsating stars include the Cepheid variables , used in measuring distances within the Milky Way and to nearby galaxies. In addition, massive stars in the last stages of life are the source of new elements. Fusion during the giant phases of stellar evolution produces elements like carbon, oxygen, and silicon that may be cycled toward the outer layers of the star. For the most massive stars, neutrons from fusion bombard atoms in the star to make yet more elements, including technetium, a rapidly-decaying element that doesn’t exist naturally on Earth. The more stable atoms from the dying star appear in the spectrum of its light, and are shed into interstellar space as the star dies.

The Seismology of Stars

We can’t see directly into a star’s interior. However, just as earthquakes on Earth’s surface reveal what’s going on inside the planet, the behavior of material on the surface of stars provides researchers with information about the interior. Asteroseismology is the study of vibrations of a star.

Naturally, the Sun is the star easiest to study. Researchers have measured the patterns of waves on the surface set up by the flow of atoms and energy deep inside the Sun. For more distant stars, astronomers observe variations in light from these processes. In some stars, the churn of hot matter is enough to produce “starquakes”: more violent fluctuations in the star’s behavior.

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142 Stellar Evolution

Stellar evolution is the process by which a star experiences a sequence of drastic variations during its stellar life. Depending on the initial stellar mass, this lifetime ranges from a few million years for the most massive to trillions of years for the least massive, which is considerably longer than the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years.

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Stellar evolution refers to the life-cycle of a star, typically including the evolutionary phases from protostar until stellar death (as a supernova, black hole, neutron star, white dwarf, etc.).  Related studies include research on the process of stellar evolution and the early (star formation) and late (explosion or collapse to compact object) stages of a star’s life.

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This chapter includes the work done for the Nobel Prizes awarded to S. Chandrasekhar and W. A. Fowler in 1983.Their work relates to stellar evolution, in particular to the structure of white dwarf stars and the generation of chemical elements in the Universe.

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Stellar Evolution Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Life , DNA , Energy , Collapse , Stars , Gravity , Heat , Stress

Published: 01/20/2020

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Stellar evolution refers to the processes and radical changes undergone by a star during its lifespan. It is the process through which pressure and forces of gravity change or alter a star. Depending on its mass, the lifespan of a star can take several million years or trillions of years. Stars undergo several stages during their lifetime, with the first stage being Giant Molecular Cloud. During the Giant Molecular cloud, a star begins its life at this stage where it is a large, dust- filled cloud of gas which is very cold. Fragments of solar masses start collapsing due to a number of reasons, for instance, shock waves. The next stage is Protostar whereby the clump of gas starts collapsing and releasing heat from its centre as it collapses. Energy from gravity is converted to heat and it produces a lot of microwave and infrared radiation. Although it is hot enough to glow at this point, the gas and dust block its visibility. T- Tauri is the next stage whereby the strong winds around the star get rid of a lot of materials from the star, including the gas and dust cocoon. It then starts fusion. Main Sequence is the next stage whereby the star becomes stable due to Hydrostatic equilibrium. It fuses hydrogen to helium in its core. It spends most of its lifetime (90%) at this stage. The next stage is the Subgiant, Red Giant, in which the star has run out of core fusion fuel and its hydrostatic equilibrium has been disturbed. The core reduces in size and there is rapid fusion around core stars’ shells. It increases its energy output (Luminosity) and the gas enveloping the core is puffed out. On the surface, the energy spreads out to cover a much larger area making it cooler and lighter red in color. It is smaller in size than the previous stage. After the Main Sequence, Core fusion is the next stage where the star is much smaller in size and hot enough to begin helium fusion. It becomes bigger and more stable at the end of this stage. Red Giant, Supergiant is the next stage whereby the core fuel has run out once more. It may repeat stages 5 to 7, depending on mass. Here, stellar nucleosynthesis of the heavier elements takes place. There is interaction of nuclear fusion and gravity. After Red Giant, Supergiant, Planetary Nebula or Supernova is the next stage in which the outer layers are ejected as the core shrinks and becomes more compact. Low mass stars could go the way of the planetary nebula while high mass stars go the way of the explosive supernova. The last stage in the lifecycle of a star is the remnant whereby the low mass core shrinks in size to form White Dwarf. It does not collapse further due to electrons present and is about the same size as the earth. The main forces responsible for the formation are stars are the force of gravity and pressure..

Kaufmann, W. (1994). Universe. New York, NY: Freeman and Company.

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Stars and Stellar Evolution

• Klaas de Boer and Wilhelm Seggewiss
• X / Twitter

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• Language: English
• Publisher: EDP Sciences
• Copyright year: 2008
• Audience: College/higher education;
• Main content: 332
• Keywords: Astrophysics
• Published: October 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9782759803286
• ISBN: 9782759803569

Star Basics

Astronomers estimate that the universe could contain up to one septillion stars – that’s a one followed by 24 zeros. Our Milky Way alone contains more than 100 billion, including our most well-studied star, the Sun.

Stars are giant balls of hot gas – mostly hydrogen, with some helium and small amounts of other elements. Every star has its own life cycle, ranging from a few million to trillions of years, and its properties change as it ages.

Stars form in large clouds of gas and dust called molecular clouds. Molecular clouds range from 1,000 to 10 million times the mass of the Sun and can span as much as hundreds of light-years. Molecular clouds are cold which causes gas to clump, creating high-density pockets. Some of these clumps can collide with each other or collect more matter, strengthening their gravitational force as their mass grows. Eventually, gravity causes some of these clumps to collapse. When this happens, friction causes the material to heat up, which eventually leads to the development of a protostar – a baby star. Batches of stars that have recently formed from molecular clouds are often called stellar clusters, and molecular clouds full of stellar clusters are called stellar nurseries.

At first, most of the protostar’s energy comes from heat released by its initial collapse. After millions of years, immense pressures and temperatures in the star’s core squeeze the nuclei of hydrogen atoms together to form helium, a process called nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion releases energy, which heats the star and prevents it from further collapsing under the force of gravity.

Astronomers call stars that are stably undergoing nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium main sequence star s . This is the longest phase of a star’s life. The star’s luminosity, size, and temperature will slowly change over millions or billions of years during this phase. Our Sun is roughly midway through its main sequence stage.

A star’s gas provides its fuel, and its mass determines how rapidly it runs through its supply, with lower-mass stars burning longer, dimmer, and cooler than very massive stars. More massive stars must burn fuel at a higher rate to generate the energy that keeps them from collapsing under their own weight. Some low-mass stars will shine for trillions of years – longer than the universe has currently existed – while some massive stars will live for only a few million years.

At the beginning of the end of a star’s life, its core runs out of hydrogen to convert into helium. The energy produced by fusion creates pressure inside the star that balances gravity’s tendency to pull matter together, so the core starts to collapse. But squeezing the core also increases its temperature and pressure, making the star slowly puff up. However, the details of the late stages of the star’s death depend strongly on its mass.

A low-mass star’s atmosphere will keep expanding until it becomes a subgiant or giant star while fusion converts helium into carbon in the core. (This will be the fate of our Sun, in several billion years.) Some giants become unstable and pulsate, periodically inflating and ejecting some of their atmospheres. Eventually, all the star’s outer layers blow away, creating an expanding cloud of dust and gas called a planetary nebula.

All that’s left of the star is its core, now called a white dwarf, a roughly Earth-sized stellar cinder that gradually cools over billions of years.

A high-mass star goes further. Fusion converts carbon into heavier elements like oxygen, neon, and magnesium, which will become future fuel for the core. For the largest stars, this chain continues until silicon fuses into iron. These processes produce energy that keeps the core from collapsing, but each new fuel buys it less and less time. The whole process takes just a few million years. By the time silicon fuses into iron, the star runs out of fuel in a matter of days. The next step would be fusing iron into some heavier element but doing so requires energy instead of releasing it.

The star’s iron core collapses until forces between the nuclei push the brakes, then it rebounds. This change creates a shock wave that travels outward through the star. The result is a huge explosion called a supernova. The core survives as an incredibly dense remnant, either a neutron star or a black hole .

Material cast into the cosmos by supernovae and other stellar events will enrich future molecular clouds and become incorporated into the next generation of stars.

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Astrophysics > Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Title: modeling the secular evolution of embedded protoplanetary discs.

Abstract: Context: Protoplanetary discs are known to form around nascent stars from their parent molecular cloud as a result of angular momentum conservation. As they progressively evolve and dissipate, they also form planets. While a lot of modeling efforts have been dedicated to their formation, the question of their secular evolution, from the so-called class 0 embedded phase to the class II phase where discs are believed to be isolated, remains poorly understood. Aims: We aim to explore the evolution between the embedded stages and the class II stage. We focus on the magnetic field evolution and the long-term interaction between the disc and the envelope. Methods: We use the GPU-accelerated code \textsc{Idefix} to perform a 3D, barotropic, non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) secular core collapse simulation that covers the system evolution from the collapse of the pre-stellar core until 100 kyr after the first hydrostatic core formation and the disc settling while ensuring sufficient vertical and azimuthal resolutions (down to $10^{-2}$ au) to properly resolve the disc internal dynamics and non-axisymmetric perturbations. Results: The disc evolution leads to a power-law gas surface density in Keplerian rotation that extends up to a few 10 au. The magnetic flux trapped in the disc during the initial collapse decreases from 100 mG at disc formation down to 1 mG by the end of the simulation. After the formation of the first hydrostatic core, the system evolves in three phases. A first phase with a small ($\sim 10$ au), unstable, strongly accreting ($\sim10^{-5}$ $\mathrm{M_\odot \, yr^{-1}}$) disc that loses magnetic flux over the first 15 kyr, a second phase where the magnetic flux is advected with a smooth, expanding disc fed by the angular momentum of the infalling material...

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Cosmic Forecast: Blurry With a Chance of Orbital Chaos

Astronomers have gotten better at tracking the motions of stars just beyond the solar system. But that’s made it harder to predict Earth’s future and reconstruct its past.

By Dennis Overbye

Regardless of what stock market analysts, political pollsters and astrologers might say, we can’t predict the future. In fact, we can’t even predict the past.

So much for the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician, philosopher and king of determinism. In 1814, Laplace declared that if it were possible to know the velocity and position of every particle in the universe at one particular moment — and all the forces that were acting on them — “for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain, and the future, just like the past, would be the present to it.”

Laplace’s dream remains unfulfilled because we can’t measure things with infinite precision, and so tiny errors propagate and accumulate over time, leading to ever more uncertainty. As a result, in the 1980s astronomers including Jaques Laskar of the Paris Observatory concluded that computer simulations of the motions of the planets could not be trusted when applied more than 100 million years into the past or future. By way of comparison, the universe is 14 billion years old and the solar system is about five billion years old.

“You can’t cast an accurate horoscope for a dinosaur,” Scott Tremaine, an orbital dynamics expert at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., commented recently in an email.

The ancient astrological chart has now become even blurrier. A new set of computer simulations, which take into account the effects of stars moving past our solar system, has effectively reduced the ability of scientists to look back or ahead by another 10 million years. Previous simulations had considered the solar system as an isolated system, a clockwork cosmos in which the main perturbations to planetary orbits were internal, resulting from asteroids.

“The stars do matter,” said Nathan Kaib, a senior scientist with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. He and Sean Raymond of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France published their results in Astrophysical Journal Letters in late February.

The researchers discovered that a sunlike star named HD 7977, which currently lurks 247 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, could have passed close enough to the sun about 2.8 million years ago to rattle the largest planets in their orbits.

That added uncertainty makes it even harder for astronomers to forecast more than 50 million years into the past, to correlate temperature anomalies in the geological record with possible changes in the Earth’s orbit. That knowledge would be useful as we try to understand climatic changes underway today. About 56 million years ago, Dr. Kaib said, the Earth evidently went through the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period lasting more than 100,000 years during which average global temperatures increased as much as 8 degrees Celsius.

Was this warm spell triggered by some change in Earth’s orbit around the sun? We may never know.

“So I’m no expert, but I think that’s the warmest period in, like, the last 100 million years,” Dr. Kaib said. “And it’s almost certainly not caused by the Earth’s orbit itself. But we do know that long-term climate fluctuations are tied to Earth’s orbital fluctuations. And so if you want to figure out climate anomalies, it helps to be confident in what Earth’s orbit is doing.”

Dr. Tremaine noted, “The simulations are carefully done, and I believe the conclusion is correct.” He added, “This is a relatively minor change in our understanding of the history of the Earth’s orbit, but it is a conceptually important one.”

The really interesting story, he said, is how chaos in Earth’s orbit could have left a mark in the paleoclimate record.

The ability to track the movements of stars just beyond the solar system has been dramatically improved by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, which has been mapping the locations, motions and other properties of two billion stars since its launch in 2013.

“For the first time we can actually see individual stars,” Dr. Kaib said, “project them back in time or forward, and figure out which stars are close to the sun and which ones haven’t come close, which is really cool.”

According to his calculations, about 20 stars come within one parsec (about 3.26 light-years) of the sun every million years. HD 7977 could have come as close as 400 billion miles from the sun — about the distance to the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of frozen comets on the edge of the solar system — or remained a thousand times as distant. Gravitational effects from the closer encounter could have rattled the orbits of the outer giant planets, which in turn could have rattled the inner planets like Earth.

“That is potentially powerful enough to alter simulations’ predictions of what Earth’s orbit was like beyond approximately 50 million years ago,” Dr. Kaib said.

As a result, he said, almost anything is statistically possible if you look ahead far enough. “So you find that, for instance, if you go forward billions of years, not all the planets are necessarily stable. There’s actually about a 1 percent chance that Mercury will either hit the sun or Venus over the course of the next five billion years.”

Whatever happens, chances are we won’t be around to see it. Stranded in the present, we don’t know for certain where we came from or where we are going; the future and the past recede into myth and hope. Yet we press forward trying to peer past our horizons in time and space. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in “The Great Gatsby”: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

An earlier version of this article misstated the possible distance between HD 7977 and the sun. It was 400 billion miles, not 4 billion. It also misstated Sean Raymond’s affiliation. He is at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux in France, not the University of Oklahoma.

How we handle corrections

Dennis Overbye is the cosmic affairs correspondent for The Times, covering physics and astronomy. More about Dennis Overbye

What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event  that’s out of this world with  our space and astronomy calendar .

A new set of computer simulations, which take into account the effects of stars moving past our solar system, has effectively made it harder to predict Earth’s future and reconstruct its past.

Dante Lauretta, the planetary scientist who led the OSIRIS-REx mission to retrieve a handful of space dust , discusses his next final frontier.

A nova named T Coronae Borealis lit up the night about 80 years ago. Astronomers say it’s expected to put on another show  in the coming months.

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Stellar Blade demo arrives March 29

Get a taste of Shift Up’s sleek action adventure ahead of its April 26 PS5 release.

Greetings. This is Hyung Tae Kim, director of Stellar Blade . We are pleased to officially announce the upcoming free playable demo for Stellar Blade, coming March 29 to PlayStation 5.

The demo takes place from the very beginning of the game when Eve, a member of the 7 th Airborne Squad is sent to Earth on a mission to reclaim the planet from the Naytiba, up to the first boss fight. This first stage will include the tutorial phase to help you familiarize yourself with basic combat features as you explore post-war Eidos 7, a human city now infested by the Naytiba, giving you an early grasp of gameplay mechanics that will serve you throughout the game’s story.

We also have a little surprise included for players who complete the first stage.

From the smooth 60fps combat to the haptics, you’ll feel through the DualSense wireless controller, there are various charms of the game that you can only confidently appreciate through hands-on experience.

For those who complete the demo stage, you can carry over your save data when the full game releases on April 26, starting from the last checkpoint. Please note that save data must be stored on your PS5 system.

The Stellar Blade demo will be available starting Friday, March 29 from 7am PDT / 2pm GMT.

Alongside the demo, the full game will feature the following language options:

Voice Over: Korean, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Latin Spanish.

Text: Korean, English (US), French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Arabic, Turkish, Thai, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese.

We greatly appreciate your anticipation! Mark your calendar for April 26, and make sure not to miss the preorder bonuses. The time for humankind to reclaim Earth has nearly arrived.

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