PHYS 1412: A Star is Born and/or Dead

Since I'm tired of meta-logging I'm going to keep this window open as I go through the CD presentation "Birth and Death of Stars" for taking notes. It would be counter-productive to take full-on notes for this particular exercise, so instead I will just jot down interesting things I learn in the course of traveling the fifty pages.

• Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs): concentrations of dust and gas that might someday become stars.
• Herbig Haro and T-Tauri objects are more luminous than main sequence stars because of the gas and dust cocoon increasing their diameter.
• A 15 M_Sun star will live about 15 million years.
• A low mass M-type star could live up to 15 billion years.
• They're called planetary nebulae only because the first ones discovered resembled the round disks of planets.
• Chandrasekhar Limit -- 1.4 solar mass limit for the cores after the planetary nebulae shed their layers.
• The carbon burning phase of a star may last 1000 years. Silicon burning can take only a few hours. (All the burning stages decrease as time goes on.)
• Astronomers believe that most of the atoms heavier than iron were created in supernova explosions.
• The supernova death of one star can lead to the birth of many others.
• The supernova's core: electrons smash around and combine with protons to make neutrons. They also release large numbers of neutrinos. It's a "neutron star" because it's all neutrons.
• Neutron stars may be only ten miles across.
• Neutron stars can rotate as fast as 2,000 times per second.
• The first neutron star was discovered in 1967 as a pulsing radio signal. At first they thought it was an extraterrestrial communication.
• Perhaps these texts are conscientously inclusive of both genders, but there seem to be a surprising number of women who have been a part of significant events in astronomy.
• The Crab Nebula Pulsar is the only neutron star we've actually seen. It is the star that went supernova in 1054.
• A star with more than 30-40 solar masses will have a core of more than 3 solar masses.
• A black hole is an object whose mass is so large and its diameter is so small anything would have to travel faster than the speed of light to escape. But, of course, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. So nothing can escape.
• The more mass a singularity has, the larger the diameter of the black hole.

All done. Now on this week's lab.