Do you see those stars behind me? This is the story of how stars like those came to life. How the universe gave birth to amazing radiant bodies known as stars.
Welcome to the life cycle of a star
Stellar Nebula: Stage 1
When the core has sufficient heat to ignite infusion, a star is formed.
When knots within the nebula contain sufficient mass in the form of gas and dust, it begins to collapse from gravitational attraction.
As it collapses, pressure from gravity heats up materials in the centre. This creates what is known as a protostar.
Massive Star: Stage 2
The stars shines steadily until the hydrogen has all fused to form helium, thus depleting its fuel and turning into a red supergiant. (millions of years)
Massive stars are stars that larger than 8 solar masses (3-50X sun's mass).
These stars are in the prime of life and are born from stellar nebulae. It has a surface temperature of around 40,000K
The red supergiant has a helium core surrounded by a shell of cooling, expanding gas with a surface temperature of 4,100K.
Red supergiants has the largest radius of all types of stars.
More cool than massive stars (red). It also forms different elements when it runs out of hydrogen to use as fuel.
Red Supergiant
Supernova: Stage 4
This causes an explosion known as a supernova in which a shock wave blows the outer layer of the star into space.
Gravity collapses the star and the light from the supernova can out shine galaxies for a few days or even months!
The core of a red supermassive collapses rapidly, taking less than 1 second to collapse.
If the core of the star survives the supernova and has a mass of greater than 3 solar masses, the core becomes a black hole.
Fun fact: If you fall into a stellar black hole, you would last a fraction of a second. However, for a supermassive black hole, you may last a few hours.
Black Hole: Stage 5
A Black hole has extremely an extremely intense gravitational pull which sucks all matter and light, making it invisible.