PHYS 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Large Magellanic Cloud, Sn 1987A, Irregular Galaxy
Document Summary
The life cycle of a star roughly the size of our sun: Stars larger than about 10 masses of the sun go through multiple cycles of core collapse and heating, fusing in turn helium, carbon, and all the way up to iron. But once they get to iron, the star is in trouble iron will not fuse, the cycle stops, and gravity takes over once again. The star implodes and then explodes in an event called a supernova. The life cycle of a star depends on its mass. The star is so massive that the iron core only lasts for about 1 second. Supernova 1604, also known as kepler"s supernova, kepler"s nova or kepler"s star, was the last supernova that occurred in the milky way. Johannes kepler depicted it in a drawing, the supernova is the stella nova identified with the letter n in the figure supernova 2006x (sn2006x). Left: an image taken on november 13, 2005 before the explosion.
