Educators' Corner
Background: Life Cycles of Stars
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The Life Cycles of Stars: How Supernovae Are Formed
It is very poetic to say that we are made from the dust of the stars. Amazingly, it's also true! Much of our bodies, and our planet, are made of elements that were created in the explosions of massive stars. Let's examine exactly how this can be.
Life Cycles of Stars
A star's life cycle is determined by its mass. The larger its mass, the shorter its life cycle. A star's mass is determined by the amount of matter that is available in its nebula, the giant cloud of gas and dust from which it was born. Over time, the hydrogen gas in the nebula is pulled together by gravity and it begins to spin. As the gas spins faster, it heats up and becomes as a protostar. Eventually the temperature reaches 15,000,000 degrees and nuclear fusion occurs in the cloud's core. The cloud begins to glow brightly, contracts a little, and becomes stable. It is now a main sequence star and will remain in this stage, shining for millions to billions of years to come. This is the stage our Sun is at right now.
As the main sequence star glows, hydrogen in its core is converted into helium by nuclear fusion. When the hydrogen supply in the core begins to run out, and the star is no longer generating heat by nuclear fusion, the core becomes unstable and contracts. The outer shell of the star, which is still mostly hydrogen, starts to expand. As it expands, it cools and glows red. The star has now reached the red giant phase. It is red because it is cooler than it was in the main sequence star stage and it is a giant because the outer shell has expanded outward. In the core of the red giant, helium fuses into carbon. All stars evolve the same way up to the red giant phase. The amount of mass a star has determines which of the following life cycle paths it will take from there.
diagram of the life cycles of low and high-mass stars
The life cycle of a low mass star (left oval) and a high mass star (right oval).
The illustration above compares the different evolutionary paths low-mass stars (like our Sun) and high-mass stars take after the red giant phase. For low-mass stars (left hand side), after the helium has fused into carbon, the core collapses again. As the core collapses, the outer layers of the star are expelled. A planetary nebula is formed by the outer layers. The core remains as a white dwarf and eventually cools to become a black dwarf.
On the right of the illustration is the life cycle of a massive star (10 times or more the size of our Sun). Like low-mass stars, high-mass stars are born in nebulae and evolve and live in the Main Sequence. However, their life cycles start to differ after the red giant phase. A massive star will undergo a supernova explosion. If the remnant of the explosion is 1.4 to about 3 times as massive as our Sun, it will become a neutron star. The core of a massive star that has more than roughly 3 times the mass of our Sun after the explosion will do something quite different. The force of gravity overcomes the nuclear forces which keep protons and neutrons from combining. The core is thus swallowed by its own gravity. It has now become a black hole which readily attracts any matter and energy that comes near it. What happens between the red giant phase and the supernova explosion is described below.
