Science Documentary: The Sun, a science documentary on star life cycles, star formation

Science Documentary: The Sun, a science documentary on star life cycles, star formation

When we look up at the night sky on a clear night, we see thousands of stars. But that is only a tiny fraction of the stars that make up our milky way galaxy. The stars we can see with our naked eye are just the biggest and brightest.

Our sun is an average size star in the middle of its life span of about 10 billion years. In its core it is fusing hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. This is called nuclear fusion. Through nuclear fusion, photons of light energy are produced. These photons start out as gamma rays, then, they loose energy as they try to make their way through the stars thick plasma and become downgraded to x-ray photons, before escaping the surface as ultraviolet photons of light. This process takes on average, between 100,000 years up to a million years. But once they reach the surface the light photons take only 8 minutes to reach the earth.

It is believed that star formation occurs when gas clouds get compressed by the shockwave of a nearby supernova. As a really massive star explodes, it sends its 'guts', made up the various elements that make up all things we see, including us, out into the surrounding space and when it slams into a nearby stellar nebula or cloud of space dust and gas, it compresses and heats this cloud until hot enough for hydrogen atoms to fuse together to form helium, and a star is born.

All stars start by fusing hydrogen into helium, then helium into carbon, then carbon into oxygen. The really massive stars fuse heavier and heavier elements. When a star starts to form iron, in its core, nuclear fusion stops and the star explodes in a supernova explosion. The luminosity of a supernova is so bright that it can out shine entire galaxies of billions of stars. When a star explodes during a supernova, it forms even heavier elements like gold.

This work, "Science Documentary: The Sun, a science documentary on star life cycles, star formation", is a derivative of "What are stars?" by "The Conversation", used under CC BY

Видео Science Documentary: The Sun, a science documentary on star life cycles, star formation канала ScienceRound