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The more massive the star, the shorter its lifespan, primarily because massive stars have greater pressure on their cores, causing them to burn hydrogen more rapidly. The most massive stars last an average of a few million years, while stars of minimum mass (red dwarfs) burn their fuel very slowly and can last tens to hundreds of billions of years.
A K-type main-sequence star, also referred to as a K-type dwarf, or orange dwarf, is a main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) star of spectral type K and luminosity class V. These stars are intermediate in size between red M-type main-sequence stars ("red dwarfs") and yellow/white G-type main-sequence stars .
Representative lifetimes of stars as a function of their masses The change in size with time of a Sun-like star Artist's depiction of the life cycle of a Sun-like star, starting as a main-sequence star at lower left then expanding through the subgiant and giant phases, until its outer envelope is expelled to form a planetary nebula at upper right Chart of stellar evolution
Pogson's original 1856 paper defined magnitude 6.0 to be the faintest star the unaided eye can see, [11] but the true limit for faintest possible visible star varies depending on the atmosphere and how high a star is in the sky. The Harvard Photometry used an average of 100 stars close to Polaris to define magnitude 5.0. [12]
For example, 3C 273 has an average apparent magnitude of 12.8 (when observing with a telescope), but an absolute magnitude of −26.7. If this object were 10 parsecs away from Earth it would appear nearly as bright in the sky as the Sun (apparent magnitude −26.744).
The following is a list of particularly notable actual or hypothetical stars that have their own articles in Wikipedia, but are not included in the lists above.. BPM 37093 — a diamond star
Marginal cases are allowed; for example, a star may be either a supergiant or a bright giant, or may be in between the subgiant and main-sequence classifications. In these cases, two special symbols are used: A slash (/) means that a star is either one class or the other. A dash (-) means that the star is in between the two classes.
Stellar density is the average number of stars within a unit volume. It is similar to the stellar mass density, which is the total solar masses (M Sun ) found within a unit volume. Typically, the volume used by astronomers to describe the stellar density is a cubic parsec (pc 3 ).