This article describes how large gas bombs end their lives. (If you thought this article was going to be about pop stars, you can walk away). emotion
Stars produce energy in their cores by burning hydrogen into helium. But when all the hydrogen is gone, the star dies.
Stars have 4 types of decay, depending on their mass.
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Type 1. Little stars.
Stars that are about half the size of the Sun end their lives very calmly and leisurely. When all the hydrogen is gone, the star slowly becomes smaller and dimmer until it slowly becomes a black dwarf. The black dwarf is about the size of Earth. But this process is very slow and may continue for longer than the universe exists now.
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Type 2. Average stars.
A star the size of the Sun, and later the Sun itself, when it uses up all the remaining hydrogen, begins to expand and become a red giant. It swells and loses its density. In this process, the nearest planets can be "eaten". (It will happen to us, sometime later). emotion Then, after some time, the star will throw out a planetary nebula, which looks like a huge colorful cloud. (In the bottom picture). A new star may begin to form from this cloud sometime later. But the remnant, from the core of the dying star, is the white dwarf. This Earth-sized star is also slowly dying out, becoming a cold, black dwarf.
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Type 3. Massive stars.
Well, this is no longer an exaggeration. When the biggest stars die, all the star's neighbors know about it. These stars are typically 8 times the mass of the Sun and die in a huge explosion. This star also expands EVEN larger at the beginning of its end and becomes a red supergiant, until at some point the pressure in the core drops rapidly and all the outer layers of the star begin to fall towards the core due to gravity. When this happens, the core collapses, or quickly shrinks smaller, and in this way a huge explosion occurs - a nova. At that moment, the star destroys itself in a brilliant explosion. The outer layers are ejected into space, but the core continues to contract. After the explosion, the star has two options to end his life.
1. Nuclei with lower mass turn into a neutron star. Neutron stars are more than 3 times more massive than the Sun, but only a few kilometers in diameter. They are extremely dense for their size. One teaspoon of neutron star matter weighs 5 billion tons.
2. Heavier nuclei never stop shrinking. The nucleus at one point becomes smaller than an atom and remains a black hole. The nearest black hole is 1,600 light years from Earth.
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Black hole.