Stars and Galaxies

By: Ellen Wertz and Sarah Broge

StarsStars appear as fixed luminous points in the sky at night. Stars first start out as a protostar. Next comes the Fusion Ignition stage. Then Main Stage. Next onto the Super giant/Red giant. Mostly referred to the Red Giant. The main stage is turned into the Red giant because it runs out of fuel. And lastly it will then turn into the white dwarf/Black Hole.

Red Dwarfs

Can range from hundred times smaller than the sun, to only a little bit smaller. Because the Red Dwarfs are so small they burn fuel very slowly which allows them to live longer. They could live up to millions maybe even billions of years before the fuel burns out. Red Dwarfs are red because they burn only a little bit of fuel which makes them less hot. They are also the most common star in the outer space.

Yellow Star and Blue Stars

Yellow Star: Medium stars like the Yellow Stars are yellow because they have a medium temperature. Their higher temperatures make the star burn more fuel faster. The gas from the Yellow Star creates a cloud called the Planetary Nebula.

Blue Giant: Very large and compact. They burn fuel quickly which makes them have a very high temperature. The Blue Giant is a very bright star. Scientists can find new stars forming because the blue giants live for a short time.

Giant Star and Super Giant Star

Giant Star: Many of the stars in the sky are Giant stars. They glow very brightly. When the sun becomes a giant star it will be seen farther away than it is now.

Super Giant Star: It is the same thing as a Giant star, but bigger. If this kind of star were to replace the sun it would extend all the way to Uranus. As the star runs out of fuel then it will start to burn out.

Galaxies

• Galaxies: large systems of stars and interstellar matter typically containing several million to some trillion stars of masses between several million and several trillion times of our Sun of an extension of a few thousands to several 100,000 light years typically separated by millions light years distance.

• They come in a variety of flavors: Spiral, lenticular, elliptical and irregular. Besides simple stars they typically contain various types of star clusters and nebulae.

Spiral and Lenticular

• Spiral consist of two major components: a large flat disk usually containing interstellar matter, and young star clusters, and associations. The pattern that these galaxies make in the disk are most probably transient phenomena only cause by gravitational interaction with neighboring galaxies. The young stars are population I and the old bulge stars are population II.

• Lenticular are basically spiral galaxies without spiral structure. Smooth disk galaxies where stellar formation has stopped long ago because interstellar matter was used up. They only consist of old bulge population II stars. Can hardly be distinguished from elliptical observantly.

Elliptical and Irregular

• Elliptical galaxies are actually of ellipsoidal shape and it is now quite safe from observation that they are usually triaxial or known as cosmic footballs refered to by Paul Murdin, David Allen, and David Malin.

• Irregular is often due to distortion by the gravitation of their intergalactic neighbors these galaxies do not fit well into the scheme of disks and ellipsoids but exibit peculiar shapes. A subclass of distorted disks is however frequently occurring.

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