It’s just over 4 light-years away in the southern constellation Centaurus. Our closest stellar neighbor, shown here in this Hubble image, is the red dwarf Proxima Centauri. But a magnetar’s can be 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet’s and up to a thousand times stronger than a typical neutron star’s. Magnetars: All neutron stars have strong magnetic fields. Some pulsars spin faster than blender blades. As they rotate, the spots spin in and out of view like the beams of a lighthouse. Bright X-ray hot spots form on the surfaces of these objects. Pulsars: These are a type of rapidly rotating neutron star. The remnant core is a superdense neutron star. The result is a huge explosion called a supernova. The core collapses and then rebounds back to its original size, creating a shock wave that travels through the star’s outer layers. The next step would be fusing iron into some heavier element, but doing so requires energy instead of releasing it. By the time silicon fuses into iron, the star runs out of fuel in a matter of days. These processes produce energy that keep the core from collapsing, but each new fuel buys it less and less time. This process continues as the star converts neon into oxygen, oxygen into silicon, and finally silicon into iron. But then, when the core runs out of helium, it shrinks, heats up, and starts converting its carbon into neon, which releases energy. (Heavier stars produce stellar-mass black holes.) The star starts fusing helium to carbon, like lower-mass stars. Neutron stars are stellar remnants that pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere about as wide as New York City’s Manhattan Island is long.Ī neutron star forms when a main sequence star with between about eight and 20 times the Sun’s mass runs out of hydrogen in its core. The pulsar resides over 1,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Vela. The Vela pulsar is located in the circular white dot in the center of this image captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. They range in luminosity, color, and size – from a tenth to 200 times the Sun’s mass – and live for millions to billions of years. Main sequence stars make up around 90% of the universe’s stellar population. Scientists call a star that is fusing hydrogen to helium in its core a main sequence star. Fusion releases energy that heats the star, creating pressure that pushes against the force of its gravity. This process occurs when two protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, merge to form one helium nucleus. When the clump's core heats up to millions of degrees, nuclear fusion starts. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the clump gains mass, starts to spin, and heats up. Main Sequence StarsĪ normal star forms from a clump of dust and gas in a stellar nursery. Some types change into others very quickly, while others stay relatively unchanged over trillions of years. The universe’s stars range in brightness, size, color, and behavior. Credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio/SDO Scientists expect it will remain one for another 5 billion years before becoming a red giant. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of our 4.6-billion-year-old Sun, a main sequence star.
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