Interstellar Star

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The interstellar cloud is the birthing place of the low mass and high-mass stars, however there are quite a few differences between the two types of stars. As mentioned earlier, low-mass stars come from the interstellar cloud, and they are created when the cloud begins to collapse, which can happen for a number of reasons, with some being a possible collision with a nearby cloud or an explosion of a nearby star. Once the cloud begins to collapse and shrink under its own influence its temperature rises and its size shrinks. In the time frame of a few million years, hydrogen starts to fuse with helium in its core and (once the energy is released by the fusion which sustained the pressure inside the sun-rephrase complete plagiarism right here), …show more content…

High-mass stars have a few similarities to low-mass stars, as they are both created from an interstellar cloud collapsing, and they go through similar phases, but high mass stars are different from low-mass stars because they are born from larger clumps than ones that create stars similar to the sun. Because the clump is greater and its mass is greater too, which causes it to squeeze more and in doing so heats up the star more than the sun. Therefore, when the star reaches the main sequence stage of its life it is way hotter, more luminous and blue. When a star has such a high luminosity it means that it will burn through it’s fuel, hydrogen, faster so instead of it taking 10 billion years to use all its hydrogen, it actually uses up the fuel in 100 million years or less depending on the star. This causes the star to age significantly faster and once it runs out of hydrogen it begins to grow bigger in size and cool down like a low-mass star, although the massive star goes through the pulsating yellow giant phase before it can reach the red giant stage. This happens because massive stars do not go through the red giant phase twice. This is when the differences begin to shine between the low-mass and the massive stars. The massive stars’ mass begins to create a strong gravitational compression on its core and with the core being compressed its temperature progressively rises causing the hydrogen to burn even faster and this keeps the pressure the same as it supports the star. The raised temperature also allows the star to begin to fuse heavier elements to supply the energy it needs. Helium can be fused into carbon, carbon can fused into oxygen and silicon into iron. However, iron does not release energy once it has been fused and this leads to the core collapsing, because the iron core cannot support itself with gravity pulling it inward. Once the collapse happens, which happens in less than a second, a cataclysmic explosion is