White Dwarfs & Planetary Nebulae: Crash Course Astronomy #30
Today Phil follows up last week's look at the death of low mass stars with what comes next: a white dwarf. White dwarfs are incredibly hot and dense objects ...
==========
Hey folks, Phil Plait here. In the last episode of Crash Course Astronomy, I talked about the eventual fate of the Sun, and other low mass stars like it. After a series of expansions and contractions, they blow off their outer layers, become white dwarfs, and fade away over billions of years. The end. Except not so much. First, white dwarfs are pretty awesome objects, and worth investigating. And second, when a star becomes a white dwarf it produces what is, quite simply, one of the most gorgeous objects in space. To recap, when the Sun ages, it undergoes a series of changes in its core. It’s fusing hydrogen into helium now, today, and will eventually fuse helium into carbon, and it’ll make a dash of oxygen and neon too. But when it runs out of helium to fuse, it’s in trouble. It doe...
==========
Hey folks, Phil Plait here. In the last episode of Crash Course Astronomy, I talked about the eventual fate of the Sun, and other low mass stars like it. After a series of expansions and contractions, they blow off their outer layers, become white dwarfs, and fade away over billions of years. The end. Except not so much. First, white dwarfs are pretty awesome objects, and worth investigating. And second, when a star becomes a white dwarf it produces what is, quite simply, one of the most gorgeous objects in space. To recap, when the Sun ages, it undergoes a series of changes in its core. It’s fusing hydrogen into helium now, today, and will eventually fuse helium into carbon, and it’ll make a dash of oxygen and neon too. But when it runs out of helium to fuse, it’s in trouble. It doe...
