How do you know if a star is at the end of its life?

How do you know if a star is at the end of its life?

With no fuel left to burn, the hot star radiates its remaining heat into the coldness of space for many billions of years. In the end, it will just sit in space as a cold dark mass sometimes referred to as a black dwarf.

What is the final stage of a star before it dies?

When the helium fuel runs out, the core will expand and cool. The upper layers will expand and eject material that will collect around the dying star to form a planetary nebula. Finally, the core will cool into a white dwarf and then eventually into a black dwarf. This entire process will take a few billion years.

Where does a star end?

Once there is no fuel left, the star collapses and the outer layers explode as a ‘supernova’. What’s left over after a supernova explosion is a ‘neutron star’ – the collapsed core of the star – or, if there’s sufficient mass, a black hole.

Which star is nearing the end of its lifetime?

Antares is a red supergiant star that is nearing the end of its life.

What happens when a star nears the end of its life?

A star nears the end of it’s life when it begins to run low on fuel and becomes unstable. When a star becomes unstable, it begins to throw off spherical shells of gas into the space surrounding the star. U Cam is a great example of this phenomenon.

What is the final stage of a star’s life cycle?

It has a luminosity 13,000 times that of the Sun. For low mass stars, this is the final stage of their lifetime in which they generate energy via fusion. Once the helium and hydrogen shell fusion uses up all of the available fuel, the star’s life is effectively over.

What happens when a star becomes a white dwarf?

A star like our Sun will become a white dwarf when it has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Near the end of its nuclear burning stage, such a star expels most of its outer material (creating a planetary nebula) until only the hot (T > 100,000 K) core remains, which then settles down to become a young white dwarf.

What happens to a star when there is no fuel left?

Once there is no more fuel left to burn, the star will collapse and explode into a supernova — “at which time its brightness will rival that of the rest of our galaxy put together,” noted astrophysicists Paul Butterworth and Mike Arida for NASA’s Imagine the Universe!