Credit: Redshift 2.0 Multimedia Astronomy

Regardless of what most people think about stars, they do live. They are born, age and then later die. The life of a star has many stages in which it evolves. We hope to enlighten and educate you about the life cycles of stars.

A star begins its life cycle as a large, cold, dark cloud of gas and dust. This is known as a Nebula. This cloud soon turns into a clump of dust and gas due to blast waves, gravitational pull, and other disturbances. Gravity contracts this dust and gas, making it very massive. Soon the temprature at the center of the star begins to increase. This increasing temperature reaches the stage in which the star is hot enough for a fussion reaction to take place. This event causes the gravitational force that is pulling the star to be in equillibrium with the nuclear force that is pushing the star out. Gas is soon radiated out and absorbed by the dust and particles of the star. As a result of these actions the material begins to glow and a Mainsequence star is created.

When billions of years have passed the main sequence star begins to expand into a relatively large Red Giant . After many years,depending on the original size of the star, two things could take place. The first choice takes place when the star was originally a fairly relatively small star. The star would reduce in size to become a White Dwarf and dwindle out even more to become a Black dwarf and ultimately dies. If the original mainsequence star was a star of moderate size then the star would expand from being a red giant and explode to become a Nova (which is latin for "new"). If the star was relatively large then it would explode in a enormous and intense way.This event is known as a Supernova . After explosion the star would either evolve to become a massive Neutron Star or become a Black Hole which would consume everything from dust to light that would be relatively close to it. The remaining debris from the explosion of the star would attract to make another nebula and would ittarate the cycle again but differing from the cycle before it by creating a star that would be slightly smaller.