Life Cycle of Stars
The Sun
Some stats about our nearest star:
- 150 million km from Earth
- light takes 8½ minutes to travel from Sun to Earth
- surface temperature about 6000oC
- core temperature about 15,000,000oC
- main process is fusion of hydrogen nuclei to helium nuclei
- estimated age of our sun is 5 billion years
- estimated lifespan is 10 billion years
- radiation from the sun includes a range of wavelengths from the entire electromagnet spectrum including cosmic rays
Life cycle slideshow
A Flash animation of star life cycles can be found here.
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
This is a plot of absolute magnitude (actual brightness) of a star against the surface temperature of the star. When data from a number of known stars is plotted it shows the main sequence clearly as a cluster as well as separate clsuters for dwarf stars and giants.
To find out more on this topic you need to study astrophysics (click here for Astrophysics made simple)
