One must first imagine an enormous cloud of gas and dust many light-years across. Gravity, the constant force tries to pull the materials together. A few grains of dust collect a few more, then a few more, then more still. Eventually, enough gas and dust has been collected into a giant ball that, at the center of the ball, the temperature from all the gas and dust colliding into each other under great pressure of the surrounding material reaches 15 million degrees or so. A phenomenal event them occurs, nuclear fusion begins and the ball of gas and dust starts to glow. A new star has begun its life in our Universe.
The brightest item in the sky, our Sun is the object of profound respect and interest in numerous human advancements on Earth. The
…show more content…
As the contraction of the gas and dust progresses and the temperature reaches 15 million degrees or so, the pressure at the center of the ball becomes enormous. The electrons are stripped off of their parent atoms, creating a plasma. The contraction continues and the nuclei in the plasma start moving faster and faster. Eventually, they approach each other so fast that they overcome the electrical repulsion that exists between their protons. The nuclei crash into each other so hard that they stick together, or fuse. In doing so, they give off a great deal of energy. This energy from fusion pours out from the core, setting up an outward pressure in the gas around it that balances the inward pull of gravity. When the released energy reaches the outer layers of the ball of gas and dust, it moves off into space in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The ball, now a star, begins to …show more content…
Towards the end around twenty percent of the star's starting mass remains and the star spends its remaining time cooling. This contraction continue until it is just a couple of thousand miles in distance across. It has turned into a white smaller dwarf. White dwarfs remain steady as the draw of gravity is adjusted by the electrons in the center of the star repulsing one another. With no fuel left to blaze, the hot star emanates its remaining warmth into the coldness of space for some billions of years. At last, it will simply sit in space as a cool dull mass often referred to as a black
...f gas, which collapsed and broke up into individual stars. The stars are packed together most tightly in the center, or nucleus. Scientists believe it is possible that at the very center there was too much matter to form an ordinary star, or that the stars which did form were so close to each other that they coalesced to form a black hole. It is argued that really massive black holes, equivalent to a hundred million stars like the Sun, could exist at the center of some galaxies
Nuclear energy must be a consideration for the future with the rapidly depleting supply of fossil fuels. This type of energy can be created through nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. Nuclear fission is the splitting of a heavy atom into two or more parts, releasing huge amounts of energy. The release of energy can be controlled and captured for generating electricity. Nuclear fusion involves bombarding hydrogen atoms together to form helium. In the long run, nuclear fusion has greater potential than fission.
Stars explode at the end of their lifetime, sometimes when they explode the stars leave a remnant of gasses and, dust behind. What the gasses come together to form depend on the size of the remnant. If the remnant is less than 1.4 solar masses it will become a white dwarf, a hot dead star that is not bright enough to shine. If the remnant is roughly 1.4 solar masses, it will collapse. “The protons and electrons will be squashed together, and their elementary particles will recombine to form neutrons”. What results from this reaction is called a neut...
Solar nebula is a rotating flattened disk of gas and dust in which the outer part of the disk became planets while the center bulge part became the sun. Its inner part is hot, which is heated by a young sun and due to the impact of the gas falling on the disk during its collapse. However, the outer part is cold and far below the freezing point of water. In the solar nebula, the process of condensation occurs after enough cooling of solar nebula and results in the formation into a disk. Condensation is a process of cooling the gas and its molecules stick together to form liquid or solid particles. Therefore, condensation is the change from gas to liquid. In this process, the gas must cool below a critical temperature. Accretion is the process in which the tiny condensed particles from the nebula begin to stick together to form bigger pieces. Solar nebular theory explains the formation of the solar system. In the solar nebula, tiny grains stuck together and created bigger grains that grew into clumps, possibly held together by electrical forces similar to those that make lint stick to your clothes. Subsequent collisions, if not too violent, allowed these smaller particles to grow into objects ranging in size from millimeters to kilometers. These larger objects are called planetesimals. As planetesimals moved within the disk and collide with one another, planets formed. Because astronomers have no direct way to observe how the Solar System formed, they rely heavily on computer simulations to study that remote time. Computer simulations try to solve Newton’s laws of motion for the complex mix of dust and gas that we believe made up the solar nebula. Merging of the planetesimals increased their mass and thus their gravitational attraction. That, in turn, helped them grow even more massive by drawing planetesimals into clumps or rings around the sun. The process of planets building undergoes consumption of most of the planetesimals. Some survived planetesimals form small moons, asteroids, and comets. The leftover Rocky planetesimals that remained between Jupiter and Mars were stirred by Jupiter’s gravitational force. Therefore, these Rocky planetesimals are unable to assemble into a planet. These planetesimals are known as asteroids. Formation of solar system is explained by solar nebular theory. A rotating flat disk with center bulge is the solar nebula. The outer part of the disk becomes planets and the center bulge becomes the sun.
Nuclear energy has been a controversial source of alternative energy since it has been made practical in the 1950s. The goal of nuclear energy was to find a sustainable resource that would be able to replace the use of fossil fuels. Due to the exploitation and finite supply of resources such as oil and coal, an alternative to fossil fuels was needed quickly in order to provide sustainability for the future of the world. A question arises, however, when nuclear energy is considered as a source of energy: Is nuclear energy a reasonable alternative to fossil fuels?
If the star is big enough and the pressure inside quickly disappears, gravity would and should slingshot the star into a tiny point with near infinite density with an extremely strong gravitatio... ... middle of paper ... ...is its anti particle. When these particles appear, they will shortly annihilate each other because they are exact opposites (UCR). However, if one of these particle pairs appears at the event horizon of a black hole, the gravity from the black hole will tear the pair of particles apart. The normal particle will have just enough energy to escape the black hole.
The Sun is a huge, bright sphere that is mostly made up of gas that is about 5 billion years old. The Sun is the closest to the Earth, it is 145 million km distant (this distance is called an Astronomical Unit). The next closest star is 300,000 times further away. There are probably millions of similar stars in the Milky Way galaxy (and even more galaxies in the Universe), but the Sun is the most important to us because it supports life on Earth.
A star begins as nothing more than a very light distribution of interstellar gases and dust particles over a distance of a few dozen lightyears. Although there is extremely low pressure existing between stars, this distribution of gas exists instead of a true vacuum. If the density of gas becomes larger than .1 particles per cubic centimeter, the interstellar gas grows unstable. Any small deviation in density, and because it is impossible to have a perfectly even distribution in these clouds this is something that will naturally occur, and the area begins to contract. This happens because between about .1 and 1 particles per cubic centimeter, pressure gains an inverse relationship with density. This causes internal pressure to decrease with increasing density, which because of the higher external pressure, causes the density to continue to increase. This causes the gas in the interstellar medium to spontaneously collect into denser clouds. The denser clouds will contain molecular hydrogen (H2) and interstellar dust particles including carbon compounds, silicates, and small impure ice crystals. Also, within these clouds, there are 2 types of zones. There are H I zones, which contain neutral hydrogen and often have a temperature around 100 Kelvin (K), and there are H II zones, which contain ionized hydrogen and have a temperature around 10,000 K. The ionized hydrogen absorbs ultraviolet light from it’s environment and retransmits it as visible and infrared light. These clouds, visible to the human eye, have been named nebulae. The density in these nebulae is usually about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In brighter nebulae, there exists densities of up to several thousand atoms per cubic centimete...
Human fascination with the stars is as ancient as Babylonians and has been suggested to be older than Stonehenge. From “be fruitful and multiply” to “live long and prosper,” the instinct to protect and propagate the species has manifested in religion, art, and the imaginations of countless individuals. As human understanding of space treks out of the fantastical and into the scientific, the realities of traveling through and living in space are becoming clearer. Exploring, investigating, and living in space pose an expansive series of problems. However, the solutions to the problems faced by mankind's desire to reach beyond the horizon, through the night sky, and into the stars are solutions that will help in all areas of life on Earth.
If the nebula is dense enough, certain regions of it will begin to gravitationally collapse after being disturbed. As it collapses the particles begin to move more rapidly, which on a molecular level is actually heat, and photons are emitted that drive off the remaining dust and gas. Once the cloud has collapsed enough to cause the core temperature to reach ten-million degrees Celsius, nuclear fusion starts in its core and this ball of gas and dust is now a star. It begins its life as a main sequence star and little does it know its entire life has already been predetermined.
The Big Bang, the alpha of existence for the building blocks of stars, happened approximately fourteen billion years ago. The elements produced by the big bang consisted of hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium. Hydrogen and helium are the essential structure which build stars. Within these early stars, heavier elements were slowly formed through a process known as nucleosynthesis. Nucleosythesis is the process of creating new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons. As the stars expel their contents, be it going supernova, solar winds, or solar explosions, these heavier elements along with other “star stuff” are ejected into the interstellar medium where they will later be recycled into another star. This physical process of galactic recycling is how or solar system's mass came to contain 2% of these heavier elements.
After a supernova, the core is likely to travel someplace else within space. When the core is less size than about 5 solar masses, the neutrons will halt the collapse of the star. This will create a Neutron Star. Neutron stars are observed as pulsars or X-ray binaries. When the core is very large, nothing that h...
I think that right now, fission is the only way that we can get more
The Industrial Revolution sparked a need for large sources of energy. Human and animal labor could not provide the power necessary to power industrial machinery, railroads, and ships. The steam engine and later the internal combustion engine provided the bulk of the energy required by the industrial age. Today most nations are still heavily reliant on energy that comes from combustion. Usually coal, petrolium, and natural gas are used. Some hydroelectric, wind power, and nuclear fission sources are used, but in the US they accounted for less than 20% of the total energy consumption in 1997 (1). Many experts are worried that natural resources such as coal and petrolium are being depleted faster than they are being replenished, which could result in an energy crisis. Nuclear fission produces highly radioactive waste that is expensive to dispose of properly. Nuclear fusion reactors would produce much less radioactive waste and would be more efficient than nuclear fission, but to date there have been no nuclear fusion reactors that have generated usable energy output. Why is fusion power, which could be very beneficial, so hard to come by?
In an article in Scholastic, David Fisherman states, “Within seconds the fireball ejected matter/energy at velocities approaching the speed of light. At some later time—maybe seconds later, maybe years later—energy and matter began to split apart and become separate entities. All of the different elements in the universe today developed from what spewed out of this original explosion” (Fishman). The diagram above shows how vastly and rapidly the universe was created. During the inflation of the universe, it grew rapidly and doubled in size at least ninety times. While hot and dense, the universe expanded rapidly. Denise Chow wrote on space.com, “for the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the intense heat from the universe’s creation made it essentially too hot for light to shine. Atoms crashed together with enough force to break up into a dense, opaque plasma of protons, neutrons, and electrons that scattered light like fog” (Chow). After cooling, it allowed energy to be converted into particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons. Within minutes after the Big Bang, atomic nuclei formed, but it took thousands of years before electrically neural atoms were first formed. The majority of atoms that formed were hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium. Gravity caused the hydrogen and helium has to form giant clouds that will become galaxies, the smaller clouds broke apart to form stars, which was when the universe came out of its dark ages. Planets were formed by the first stars dying and releasing heavy elements into