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Artist illustration of a red dwarf star.
We think we live near an average star, but that’s not the case at all. Compared to most stars in the Universe, the Sun is a giant! Let’s look at the small end of the stellar spectrum, to stars with a fraction of the size and mass of our own Sun. There are many ways that a star can get small, and they lead dramatically different lives and deaths.
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Show Notes
- How big (or little) is our Sun? Sun’s Mass: 1.9891 ×1030 KG
- A red dwarf is a small, cool, very faint, main sequence star whose surface temperature is under about 4,000 K. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf. (via Enchanted Learning)
- Red Dwarf Stars –– Universe Today
- Red Dwarf Stars — Wiki
- How long do stars last? — Universe Today
- Paper: Habitability of Planets Around Red Dwarf Stars — University of Texas
- Gliese 581 — Wiki
- Hydrogen Burning — Cornell
- Brown Dwarf Stars — Cool Cosmos
- Research on Brown Dwarfs — UC Berkeley
- Red Dwarf Stars — Universe Today
- Red Dwarfs — Wiki
- Electron Degeneracy Pressure — Wolfram
- White Dwarf –– GSU
- White Dwarf — Goddard SFC
- Background radiation of the Universe (CMB) — UBC
- Black dwarf stars — Universe Today
- Black dwarfs — Wiki
- How are black dwarf stars and neutron stars similar? Goddard SFC
- Blue stragglers in globular clusters — SolStation
- Looking for Planets Around White Dwarf Stars –– Professor Astronomy
- Ep. 86 End of Everything Pt. 1
- Ep. 87 End of Everything Pt. 2
Sun is actually 10^30 kg not 10^33 kg! You’ve just fried us all!
The numbers tossed around are astronomical. Putting in perspective the smallest red dwarf fusing hydrogen for twelve trillion years, that is a thousand times as long as the universe has existed. When you say it will take a quadrillion years for it to cool off to just about absolute zero, that is eighty thousand times the current age of the universe.
Congrats Dr. Pamela Gay on your appearance on History Channel’s ‘The Universe’! You were awesome!