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Many of the well-known bright stars are red giants because they are luminous and moderately common. The K0 RGB star Arcturus is 36 light-years away, and Gacrux is the nearest M-class giant at 88 light-years' distance. A red giant will usually produce a planetary nebula and become a white dwarf at the end of its life.
Some red supergiants undergo blue loops where they temporarily increase in temperature before returning to the red supergiant state. This depends on the mass, rate of rotation, and chemical makeup of the star. While many red supergiants will not experience a blue loop, some can have several. Temperatures can reach 10,000K at the peak of the ...
For a star with at least 0.5 M ☉, when the hydrogen supply in its core is exhausted and it expands to become a red giant, it can start to fuse helium atoms to form carbon. The energy output of the helium fusion process per unit mass is only about a tenth the energy output of the hydrogen process, and the luminosity of the star increases. [ 48 ]
The majority of red supergiants were 10-15 M ☉ main sequence stars and now have luminosities below 100,000 L ☉, and there are very few bright supergiant (Ia) M class stars. [22] The least luminous stars classified as red supergiants are some of the brightest AGB and post-AGB stars, highly expanded and unstable low mass stars such as the RV ...
The letter "M" in this designation means that it is a red star belonging to the M spectral class and therefore has a relatively low photospheric temperature; the "Ia-ab" suffix luminosity class indicates that it is an intermediate-luminosity supergiant, with properties partway between a normal supergiant and a luminous supergiant. Since 1943 ...
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.
Relative to both luminosity and distance from Earth, a star's absolute magnitude (M) and apparent magnitude (m) are not equivalent; [184] for example, the bright star Sirius has an apparent magnitude of −1.44, but it has an absolute magnitude of +1.41. The Sun has an apparent magnitude of −26.7, but its absolute magnitude is only +4.83.
The star increases in luminosity towards the tip of the red-giant branch. Red-giant-branch stars with a degenerate helium core all reach the tip with very similar core masses and very similar luminosities, although the more massive of the red giants become hot enough to ignite helium fusion before that point.