Stars: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Andrew King
Language: English
Pages: 136
ISBN: 0199602921
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Every atom of our bodies has been part of a star. In this lively and compact introduction, astrophysicist Andrew King reveals how the laws of physics force stars to evolve, driving them through successive stages of maturity before their inevitable and sometimes spectacular deaths, to end as remnants such as black holes. The book shows how we know what stars are made of, how gravity forces stars like the Sun to shine by transmuting hydrogen into helium in their centers, and why this stage is so long-lived and stable. Eventually the star ends its life in one of just three ways, and much of its enriched chemical content is blasted into space in its death throes. Every dead star is far smaller and denser than when it began, and we see how astronomers can detect these stellar corpses as pulsars and black holes and other exotic objects. King also shows how astronomers now use stars to measure properties of the Universe, such as its expansion. Finally, the book asks how it is that stars form in the first place, and how they re-form out of the debris left by stars already dead. These birth events must also be what made planets, not only in our solar system, but around a large fraction of all stars.
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Allen C. Guelzo LINGUISTICS • Peter Matthews LITERARY THEORY • Jonathan Culler LOCKE • John Dunn LOGIC • Graham Priest MACHIAVELLI • Quentin Skinner MARTIN LUTHER • Scott H. Hendrix THE MARQUIS DE SADE • John Phillips MARX • Peter Singer MATHEMATICS • Timothy Gowers THE MEANING OF LIFE • Terry Eagleton MEDICAL ETHICS • Tony Hope MEDIEVAL BRITAIN • John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths MEMORY • Jonathan K. Foster MICHAEL FARADAY • Frank A. J. L. James MODERN ART • David Cottington.
Annas POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY • David Miller POLITICS • Kenneth Minogue POSTCOLONIALISM • Robert Young POSTMODERNISM • Christopher Butler POSTSTRUCTURALISM • Catherine Belsey PREHISTORY • Chris Gosden PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY • Catherine Osborne PRIVACY • Raymond Wacks PROGRESSIVISM • Walter Nugent PSYCHIATRY • Tom Burns PSYCHOLOGY • Gillian Butler and Freda McManus PURITANISM • Francis J. Bremer THE QUAKERS • Pink Dandelion QUANTUM THEORY • John Polkinghorne RACISM • Ali Rattansi THE.
Interstellar medium and drives powerful shock waves which heat both the ejected and swept-up interstellar gas. This gas now radiates at the huge rate of about 3 × 1010 times the Sun’s luminosity for about a year, after which it slowly decays as the ejecta sweep up more gas and decelerate. This is a core-collapse supernova. Needless to say, supernovae are very easy to see at enormous distances, and astronomers now detect several hundred per year. All of these are quite distant from us, the.
Observations of such rapid phenomena. Astronomy seemed to be a subject where significant changes occurred only over millions of years, and even planetary orbits were measured in months or years. Certainly no-one predicted what happened next. In 1967, Jocelyn Bell, a graduate student in Cambridge, was monitoring the output from an instrument designed to study interplanetary scintillation when she noticed what appeared to be regular pulses of radio emission about once per second coming from a fixed.
GANDHI • Bhikhu Parekh GEOGRAPHY • John Matthews and David Herbert GEOPOLITICS • Klaus Dodds GERMAN LITERATURE • Nicholas Boyle GERMAN PHILOSOPHY • Andrew Bowie GLOBAL CATASTROPHES • Bill McGuire GLOBAL WARMING • Mark Maslin GLOBALIZATION • Manfred Steger THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL • Eric Rauchway HABERMAS • James Gordon Finlayson HEGEL • Peter Singer HEIDEGGER • Michael Inwood HIEROGLYPHS • Penelope Wilson HINDUISM • Kim Knott HISTORY • John H. Arnold THE HISTORY OF.