Physics 0625 6.2.

Stars and the Universe

Syllabus requirements:
Stars are the life-force of the Universe.

They take matter of low mass like hydrogen, fuse it into helium and emit light and heat.

But stars do not live forever – they are born and then they die.

This section will focus on the big questions: What are stars, how are they formed, and how do
we know what we know about the Universe?

Challenge: What is the closest star to Earth?

• The Sun

The Sun is a star, a burning ball of gas which emits light and heat into space. It is by far
our closest star, being only around 152 000 000 km away from Earth.

What is a star?

A star is a ball of gas which radiates energy in the form of electromagnetic waves.

Stars come in different sizes, but they are usually (unless they are dying) made of hydrogen and
helium.

Our own Sun is an average star of an average size, about half-way through its lifespan. Some
stars are much smaller, and some are much larger.

Activity
Explore this simulation.

• Compare the size of the Earth and our Sun. You could fit more than a million Earths inside
the Sun!
 Extended

Nuclear fusion in stars

Technically, ‘burning’ is not quite the right word to use when describing what happens inside a
star.

The energy emitted by the star comes from reactions called ‘nuclear fusion’ reactions.

Inside a star, hydrogen atoms are joined together with enough force to make them stick together
(or fuse) into helium atoms. This reaction produces a lot of energy, and this energy is released
from the star in the form of electromagnetic waves.

However, this is only true of stable stars. As a star gets older, it starts to run out of hydrogen and
so it has to fuse other things together. At this point it starts to become unstable.

Galaxies
In the simulation above, you might have zoomed out far enough to see a galaxy.

Galaxies are collections of billions of stars, all orbiting around a galactic centre which is usually a
black hole.

Challenge:
Measuring large distances

Even though the Milky Way is our local galaxy, the other stars are still very far away. The
closest, Proxima Centauri, is 40 208 000 000 000 km away, about 270 000 times the distance
from the Earth to the Sun!

With these enormous distances, it becomes more and more difficult to use the kilometre as a
unit of measurement. Consequently, distance in space is often measured in light years.

A light year is the distance travelled by light waves through the vacuum of space in one Earth
year.

Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away from Earth.

One light year is approximately 9.5 × 1015 m, or 9.5 trillion km.

Life cycle of a star

Extended

A star is born

Just like our Sun, all stars are born from interstellar clouds of gas and dust.

The element hydrogen must be present in the cloud for a star to form.

Because of gravity, the interstellar cloud starts to collapse upon itself and all the hydrogen (and

other elements) clump together.

As this happens, the temperature increases because hydrogen nuclei start fusing together.

As gravity pulls in more material, the temperature increases further. At this stage, the star is

called a protostar.

Balancing forces / a stable star:

Imagine heating a balloon full of air. The hotter it gets, the more force the air is putting on the

walls of the balloon.

In a protostar, this same force starts to push back against gravity.

Gravity pulls material inwards towards the centre of the star, but as the temperature increases,

the outwards force increases too.

Eventually, the forces balance and the star becomes stable.

A star dies

The star remains stable for most of its life – usually billions of years. But eventually it starts to
run out of hydrogen.

What happens next depends on the mass of the star.

Activity

Use this simulation to investigate what happens after the star leaves the stable phase (called the
‘main sequence’ in the simulation).

Different stage of the star’s life.

Galaxies and redshift

Galaxies

Our star, the Sun, is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. It is hard to imagine just
how big a galaxy is. Figure 1 shows an image of the Milky Way with a yellow arrow pointing at
the approximate location of the Sun. The Sun is so small it is less than a pixel.

The Milky Way is approximately 100 000 light years in diameter.

Even travelling at the speed of light, it would take 100 000 years to cross it.

Light that was produced by the stars on the other side of the Milky Way when mammoths and
Neanderthals walked the Earth is only just reaching us today.

The Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the Universe. But thanks to scientific tools and
techniques we can study them, even though they are extremely far away. One of the ways in
which we study galaxies is by examining the light that they emit.
Redshift

The colour of the light, more specifically, the wavelength, can tell us a lot about these galaxies.

Watch this video

Click https://youtu.be/T9S_BoeqMf0

and then answer the questions below.

Using the idea of redshift, that the wavelength of light will appear longer when the source is
moving away from us, scientists have studied all the galaxies we can see, and found something
amazing.

Challenge:

Light from every galaxy is redshifted. And the further away the galaxy is from Earth, the more its
light is redshifted. Can you explain what this means?

Answer:

If every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy, that must mean that the
Universe is expanding.

The fact that the Universe is expanding means that, if you go back in time, it shrinks.

Go further back in time and it gets even smaller. And if you go back in time far

enough (around 13.8 billion years), the whole Universe exists in just a single place.

The idea that the Universe originated from one single place is called the Big Bang Theory.

The redshift from distant galaxies tells us that the Universe is expanding, and this supports the Big Bang
Theory.
The Universe
Extended

Seeing the early Universe

Shortly after the Big Bang, when the Universe was still very young, it was extremely hot.

The whole Universe was emitting a huge amount of radiation.

Ever since then, this radiation has been travelling across the Universe.

It is now extremely faint and has been redshifted so much that it is now in the microwave

region of the electromagnetic spectrum, but we can see it with a sensitive telescope.

Calculating the age of the Universe:

The sky between the stars looks black to the naked eye, but with the right

telescope we see the CMBR everywhere we look. The CMBR is light which was

emitted close to the beginning of the Universe. We can figure out how long ago

this was by looking at galaxies more closely.

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Hubble’s constant

Astronomer Edwin Hubble wanted to find out the relationship between how fast
galaxies were receding (moving away) from us and their distance from Earth.
Measuring these enormous distances is difficult, but we can do so if we know
exactly how bright something is, and how bright it looks from Earth.
Supernovae

A supernova is the explosion of a star.

One particular type of supernova explodes with a very specific brightness.

You can see an animation of this supernova in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yEBVm5o97E

By studying these supernovae, we can calculate exactly how far away a galaxy is.

Hubble found that for every galaxy in the sky, the ratio between the receding speed, v, and the
distance to that galaxy, d, was constant.
This constant value was named the Hubble constant, H0

Our current estimate for H0 is 2.2×10-18 per second.

Worked example 1

Galaxy NGC 5248 is receding from us at 1200 km/s. How far away is the galaxy, in light years?

Note: remember, one light year is 9.5 × 10 15 m.

Solution:
Consider the equation above. It contains the speed of a galaxy and the distance it is from Earth.
According to the Big Bang Theory, at the beginning of the Universe all the matter was in the
same place, including the matter that would one day make up the Earth and the galaxy we are
measuring. Speed, v, distance, d , and time, t , are related by the equation:

So, the time since the galaxy started moving (the time since the big bang) is the distance the

galaxy has travelled divided by its speed.

This is the reciprocal of the Hubble constant equation, so: