Have you ever wondered how a star dies, or what happen while it’s dying?
Or you've never really thought of that?
Well yes, a star can die and what I mean by dying is it vanishes.
Let's start with the classification of starts. Star classification is pretty complex stuff, there’re tons of different kinds of stars, and some of them are called as "Blue Giant", "White Dwarf", "Red Giant", and "Red Supergiant".
Right, the sun is also a star! Our sun is the type of "G2V Yellow Dwarf Main-sequence"
Each type of star has a different size, brightness,
temperature, and other things.
Pretty much all starts are unbelievable large, even our own
star can fit to more than 1 million earth, but still considered as average or small compared to the other stars in the whole space. This giant size causes tremendous gravity that’s constantly
trying to crash in the star and this push is everything the star made of
down towards the core.
The pressure is like being million miles deep in the
ocean times a million.
And that's about the gravitational energy inside of the star. Now, there's still an energy that supports the live of the star itself.
So let's talk about hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most simple and common atom in the universe and it's everywhere especially inside the stars. However, the tremendous pressure inside the star is so
strong that the nuclear become bared and separated with the electron and proton, leaving the neutron and then combined to other bare neutron and
creates a new heavier elements like helium, or oxygen. In physics this is known
as nuclear fusion.
And now the new heavier elements have tons of extra energy
they’re not used to. So they released or emits the energy as radiation. This radiation spills in space and some of it becomes the light that heat the earth, that we often say as the UV radiation.
Also, this powerful energy flowing
outward prevent the star’s gravity from crashing.
Simply put, nuclear fusion is the fuel created, and burned
by stars and it pushes powerful energy outward. However, due to their massive
sizes, stars create tremendous gravity, constantly pushing in on themselves.
Therefore, stars maintain a beautiful balance of pushing in
and pushing out. In fact, they maintain this symmetry for millions, billions,
or even trillions of years.
But unfortunately, like a car running out of gas, a star would eventually run out of nuclear fuel to burn.
Therefore, they no longer push energy outward. But there’s nothing that can
stop gravity as it’s a force, you know, the law of conservation energy. So gravity
easily wins and as a result, collapsing all of a star’s power and mass in on
itself.
Now, the entire mass of the star is crushed down into an
extremely small space. Density and pressure becomes unimaginable! As a result,
this smashed, tightly packed material explodes like a gigantic nuclear bomb. In
fact, this is truly a nuclear bomb, called a supernova.
And the supernova will produce and leave many elements in
the space like the hydrogen, calcium, and gold (aurum).
There are also two types of Supernova,
- Type I A (one A)
One or more white dwarf stars gain enough mass to collapse, causing a nuclear chain reaction explosion. - Type II (two)
A supermassive star runs out of its nuclear fuel, collapses and causes a chain reaction explosion.
There are three possibilities how a star will turns out after going through a supernova.
- It's gonna form the well-known Black Hole
This can happen when the star is hella gigantic, because the gravity must have to be reallyㅡreallyㅡstrong! - A new Neutron Star / Pulsar is gonna be created.
