Rockets speed through space. A popular sightseeing tour in the future, one of the rockets filled with schoolchildren on a field-trip, learning about stars and how they work. The multiple types of them, that include red giant, white dwarf, and neutron stars. How all stars have nuclear fusion occurring in their cores, which creates massive amounts of energy, to help it become a beautiful, bright and warming component of the universe outside our planet. Stars have different stages in their life that will affect us someday, but as of now, are fascinating to learn about and look at.
To begin with, red giant stars are swollen, masses of stars that have entered the beginning of the end of their life. This phase happens directly after the longest of the star's life, the main sequence, is over with. When a normal star, like our sun, reaches the end of its journey, it begins to collapse on itself because it can no longer counter-act the gravity pulling it inward on itself. The star begins to collapse. But all of the heat starts creating nuclear fusion in the very core of the star, thus, causing the star's output energy to maximize and push the outer layers of the star outward. This is what will become of our sun, just about eating up Mercury and Venus and Earth. Without any hydrogen left to burn for fuel, the red giant will collapse on itself and form a white dwarf, but if a star is massive enough it will begin helium burning at its core and create carbon.
Being interested by the Red Giant is easy, but there is still a cool stage after it that is key to learning the stages of stars.White dwarf is the name for stars that were medium and small in their lifetime but collapsed because it lacked the fuel it needed to survive. According to Universe Today, 97 percent of all stars will become a white dwarf, that is what destiny has in store for the sun after it is a red giant. Once the outer shell of the Red giant collapses on itself it reveals its inner core, a hot white ball of burning mass, which is why its so small and white. One of these stars is about the size of the Earth. Except this is amazingly dense because of the entire star compacting in on itself. One small cube, the size of a small Lego, would weigh close to one ton. The white dwarf begins very warm, but over time-billions, sometimes even as long as trillions of years-the star starts to cool down to the temperature of the background temperature of the galaxy. The white dwarfs can only be up to a certain amount of mass. Any point after this the individual atoms wouldn't be able to hold back the star's gravitational pull which would collapse down to a neutron star or something more decimating, a black hole.
Likewise, if a star is in between one and a half the size of our sun and five times the sun, it will become a neutron star, that is made up of many neutrons. Anything over five times our sun and you will just get a black hole. But if it's less than 1.5 times our sun, it will just become a white dwarf. Anything in between and you will get a neutron star. This star, that is incredibly beautiful to look at in pictures, is formed when it collapses in on itself, all of the protons and electrons are forced together into neutrons, since the star still has enormous amounts of gravity, any piece of debris or particles floating around space into the star would be immediately turned into a duplicate piece of neutron material. When these stars are created they maintain the thrust of a main sequence star, although they have a much smaller diameter. Causing them to spin of up to a speed of 100 times per-second. A neutron star actually has different layers, the outside layer being about a yard long, Under that there is nuclei with a growing number of neutrons. The only thing keeping them stable is the large amounts of gravity within the neutron star.
In conclusion, a star can go through many stages in its life. Just like a human, from baby to child to teen to adult to senior. Most Americans haven't even thought about how stars have stages. That they are just balls of light in the sky,nothing else. It's unbelievable that only 55 percent of Americans even know that the sun is a star. How could people be so oblivious to the very object that keeps them alive, but all stars go through at least one of these one way or another. So it is definitely awesome that a star could expand even after its lost all of its energy. Just like something in the human brain that keeps the body going even after it has become tired of running, or anything else that can wear them down. Stars are beautiful and extremely interesting to learn about and watch, because they come to an end after us so we can watch them our entire life with awe and wonder.
