Category: 6. The Death of Stars

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Everybody loves a good mystery, and astronomers are no exception. The mystery we will discuss in this section was first discovered in the mid-1960s, not via astronomical research, but as a result of a search for the tell-tale signs of nuclear weapon…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: The discussion of the life stories of stars presented so far has suffered from a bias—what we might call “single-star chauvinism.” Because the human race developed around a star that goes through life alone, we tend to think of most stars in…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: After a type II supernova explosion fades away, all that is left behind is either a neutron star or something even more strange, a black hole. We will describe the properties of black holes in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime, but for now, we want to…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Supernovae were discovered long before astronomers realized that these spectacular cataclysms mark the death of stars (see Making Connections: Supernovae in History). The word nova means “new” in Latin; before telescopes, when a star too dim to be seen with the unaided eye suddenly flared…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Thanks to mass loss, then, stars with starting masses up to at least 8 MSun (and perhaps even more) probably end their lives as white dwarfs. But we know stars can have masses as large as 150 (or more) MSun. They have a different kind…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Let’s begin with those stars whose final mass just before death is less than about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun (MSun). (We will explain why this mass is the crucial dividing line in a moment.) Note that most stars in…

Do stars die with a bang or a whimper? In the preceding two chapters, we followed the life story of stars, from the process of birth to the brink of death. Now we are ready to explore the ways that stars end their lives. Sooner or later, each star exhausts its store of nuclear energy.…