BIO 70 Notes #3

STELLAR EVOLUTION and CLASSIFICATION

A. Stellar Evolution / Life Cycle
____________ condense due to gravity forming clumps called
_______________. Temperature continues to increase to 10 MC, H fusion starts
to form He, energy released, a ____________ is born
Protostars follow one of four possible life cycles, depending on their original
mass
<0.1S _______________, glow feebly for long periods, gradually loosing
energy
0.1-1.4S Sun-like Stars; use up H fuel after 10 BY, cool, collapse, reheat,
expand into red giants. Eventually outer gaseous layers dissipate into a
planetary nebula, only the dense core remains, cools, shrinks,
_______________
>1.4S Large Stars; become red supergiants after a few MY because they
burn fuel quickly, core cools and counteracts causing explosion or
supernova, if core survives explosion it cools and contracts into
____________________
100S _______________; life span of only a few MY, collapse under the weight
of their own gravity to form _______________.

Stars over 120 times more massive than the Sun (120S) were previously
thought as impossibilities because they would be blown apart by their own
radiation. However, recently, astrophysicists have observed supernovae
that indicate the existence of these very large stars.
B. Stellar Classification and Luminosity

The ____________________diagram is used to tell a stars __________ and

_______________. A stars position is worked out by plotting its brightness against
its temperature (deduced from the color of the light that the star emits). Young,
hot stars tend to be blue, and older, cooler stars are usually red or orange. The
star is classified according to the area of the graph in which it falls.

Bright
Brightness

1
2

5
Dim

3
6

50,000C

4
3,500C

A stars brightness is
affected by distance. A
close dim star may appear
brighter than a distant
bright star. The lower the
value of apparent
magnitude, the brighter
the star as seen on Earth.

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BIO 70 Notes #3

Surface Temperature
Key Terms:
1. Red Supergiants Largest and among the brightest of stars, having a large mass
but a low density (e.g. Betelgeuse)
2. Red Giants Large stars in the latter stages of stellar evolution with diameters 10100 times that of the Sun
3. Main sequence a narrow band into which most stars cluster, including the Sun at
the present time. It runs from hot, bright stars in the top left of the diagram to
cooler, dimmer stars at the bottom right of the diagram. These are stars at the
middle of their life cycle when they are burning H fuel at a fairly constant rate.
4. Red dwarfs stars of a small mass and low temperature, which glow feebly
5. Hot subdwarfs Stars at the center of planetary nebulae
6. White dwarfs Small, dense stars near the end of their life cycle, which are slowly
cooling down
7. Variable Stars appear to vary in brightness over time
8. ____________ supernova One possible explosive death of a star. A white dwarf in a
____________ system can accrete enough mass that it cannot support its own
weight. The star collapses and temperatures become high enough for carbon
fusion to occur. Fusion begins throughout the white dwarf almost simultaneously
and an explosion occurs.
9. ____________ supernova One possible explosive death of a star, in which the
massive highly evolved stellar core rapidly implodes and then explodes,
destroying the surrounding star.
10. Neutron star a dim star of high density at the end of its life cycle composed
predominantly or entirely of neutrons
11. ____________ rapidly rotating neutron stars, emitting intermittent radio signals
12. ____________ extremely rapidly rotating neutron stars with magnetic fields that
are about a quadrillion times greater than the magnetic field of Earth.
13. Black hole a collapsed star with such high gravity that not even light can escape
from it

____________ blackholes formed at the end of a massive stars lifecycle

____________ blackholes blackholes that have a mass of 500-1000 suns
located in dense star clusters
____________ blackholes blackholes with a mass of a million or more suns
located in the centers of galaxies

14. ____________ quasi-stellar radio sources; lie in the centers of young galaxies,
where supermassive black holes suck in passing stars and gas clouds. This
material then forms an accretion disk around the black hole that gets heated by
friction until it glows brightly.
15. Double Stars or Binary Stars two stars in close proximity moving around a
common center
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BIO 70 Notes #3

16. ____________ /MACHOs Massive Compact Halo Objects; a star whose mass is less
than 1/20th of our Sun so its core is not hot enough to burn either hydrogen or
deuterium, so it shines only by virtue of its gravitational contraction. These dim
objects, intermediate between stars and planets, are not luminous enough to be
directly detectable by our telescopes.

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