The Life and Death of Stars

The Life and Death of Stars PDF Author: Kenneth R. Lang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110701638X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Explains how stars are born, how they evolve and their ultimate fates, for a broad general audience.

The Life and Death of Stars

The Life and Death of Stars PDF Author: Kenneth R. Lang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110701638X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Explains how stars are born, how they evolve and their ultimate fates, for a broad general audience.

Living with the Stars

Living with the Stars PDF Author: Karel Schrijver
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198727437
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Living with the Stars tells the fascinating story of what truly makes the human body. The body that is with us all our lives is always changing. We are quite literally not who we were years, weeks, or even days ago: our cells die and are replaced by new ones at an astonishing pace. The entire body continually rebuilds itself, time and again, using the food and water that flow through us as fuel and as construction material. What persists over time is not fixed but merely a pattern in flux. We rebuild using elements captured from our surroundings, and are thereby connected to animals and plants around us, and to the bacteria within us that help digest them, and to geological processes such as continental drift and volcanism here on Earth. We are also intimately linked to the Sun's nuclear furnace and to the solar wind, to collisions with asteroids and to the cycles of the birth of stars and their deaths in cataclysmic supernovae, and ultimately to the beginning of the universe. Our bodies are made of the burned out embers of stars that were released into the galaxy in massive explosions billions of years ago, mixed with atoms that formed only recently as ultrafast rays slammed into Earth's atmosphere. All of that is not just remote history but part of us now: our human body is inseparable from nature all around us and intertwined with the history of the universe.

The Secret Life of Stars

The Secret Life of Stars PDF Author: Lisa Harvey-Smith
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1760761583
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In The Secret Life of Stars, award-winning astronomer Lisa Harvey-Smith takes us on a cosmic journey to meet some of the weirdest, most extreme, and enigmatic stars in the universe. We all know the Sun, the powerhouse of our solar system, but what about Luyten’s Flare, the Rosino-Zwicky Object, or Chanal’s variable star? For those whose curiosity takes them far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, The Secret Life of Stars offers a personal and readily understood introduction to some of the Galaxy’s most remarkable stars. Written by award-winning astronomer Lisa Harvey-Smith, each chapter explains various different and unusual stars and their amazing characteristics and attributes, from pulsars, blue stragglers, and white dwarfs, to cannibal stars and explosive supernovae. With beautiful chapter illustrations by Eirian Chapman, this book brings to life the remarkable personalities of these stars, reminding readers what a diverse and unpredictable universe we live in and how fortunate we are to live around a stable star, our Sun.

What Stars Are Made Of

What Stars Are Made Of PDF Author: Donovan Moore
Publisher:
ISBN: 0674237374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the revolutionary scientific thinker who discovered what stars are made of. But her name is hard to find alongside those of Hubble, Herschel, and other great astronomers. Donovan Moore tells the story of Payne's life of determination against all the obstacles a patriarchal society erected against her.

The Characteristics and the Life Cycle of Stars

The Characteristics and the Life Cycle of Stars PDF Author: Larry Krumenaker
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group
ISBN: 9781404203952
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Presents a collection of essays that examines the characteristics and life cycles of stars, and analyzes how stars are formed, what goes on during the life of a star, and what happens when stars die.

The Life Cycles of Stars

The Life Cycles of Stars PDF Author: Charles River
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading When people look up into the night sky, the stars seem fixed and immutable, as unchanging as the darkness of space itself, but the truth is that stars are born, live and die in a never-ending cycle of creation and annihilation. These cycles stretch over such vast spans of time that, to short-lived humans, they seem to last forever. No one knows just how many stars there are, but their number is almost beyond comprehension. When people look up into the night sky, they can see further than they might guess: up to 19 quadrillion miles, the distance to Deneb in Cygnus, a star that is visible from most inhabited parts of Earth. In total, around five thousand stars are visible to the naked eye, though only around two thousand are visible at any one time from a particular place on Earth. All the visible stars are bigger and brighter than the Sun. Of course, there are many more known stars than those that can be seen with the naked eye. Astronomers estimate that in the Milky Way, there may be more than three hundred billion stars, and every other galaxy may have a similar number of stars. How many galaxies are there in the Universe? Again, no one is certain, but most astronomers agree that there must be many billions. Stars begin as vast clouds of dust and gas within galaxies and are known as nebulae. Due to Newton's Law of Global Attraction, the densest areas in these nebulae pull-in matter from the surrounding space. The more mass they gain, the more mass they attract. Over time, this accumulation can lead to the creation of a star. From that moment on, an eternal battle begins: gravity tends to contract the star while its growing inner pressure tends to expand it. Nebulae are stellar nurseries, the places where stars are created and an essential part of the life cycle of the Universe. Stars do not last forever. Over time they gradually lose energy and finally die. This process of the creation of new stars and the gradual death of existing stars is part of a vast, cosmic process of recycling that continues all the time. However, that raises the question of how the very first stars were formed and that in turn leads to questions about the origin of the Universe itself. However, the life cycle of stars also has a direct relationship to life here on Earth. Singer Joni Mitchell famously included the line "we are stardust" in her hit song "Woodstock." Surprisingly, it seems that she was absolutely right. In the beginning, the Universe comprised hydrogen, small quantities of helium, minuscule amounts of lithium and almost nothing else. Stars are the engines that provide the raw material from which life itself as well as stellar bodies are created. Each star is like a factory that uses nuclear fusion to convert hydrogen into helium and that in turn is used to create carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and many other elements. When a star dies, it ejects its outer layers, throwing these elements off as cosmic dust. The gravity of planets attracts and captures this dust which settles on the surface, introducing new elements. It is estimated that more than forty thousand tons of cosmic dust arrives on Earth every year and this process has continued as long as there has been a planet Earth. Some of the tiny pieces of dust (most are smaller than one-hundredth the width of a human hair) are very old indeed. Scientists have found what they call "original stardust" on meteorites and asteroids. Many of these have been drifting in space since before the Sun was created. The elements in this dust are the fundamental building-blocks of life and every living organism on Earth is created from elements that were originally produced in long-dead stars. It seems that humans and everything else on the planet really did begin as stardust.

100 Billion Suns

100 Billion Suns PDF Author: Rudolf Kippenhahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691087818
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
How are the nuclear power plants we call "stars" formed? Where do they get their energy and how do they die--and what does this suggest about the future of the universe? One of the most popular books written on astrophysics, 100 Billion Suns provides an exhilarating and authoritative life history of the stars.

Life with a Star

Life with a Star PDF Author: Jiří Weil
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810116856
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Set during the Nazi occupation of Prague, Life with a Star records the day-to-day life of Josef Roubicek, an ex-bank clerk, who discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. "One of the most powerful works to emerge from the Holocaust; it is a fierce and necessary work of art".--The New York Times.

First Life

First Life PDF Author: David Deamer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520274458
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
"The origin of life may have happened an inconceivably long time ago, but scientists like David Deamer are making major advances in understanding how the first microbes began to seethe on our planet, ultimately giving rise to all species alive today. In First Life, Deamer offers a delightful synthesis of research into life's dawn with his own vision for how it came to be."—Carl Zimmer, author of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution "No living scientist has had a greater impact on our understanding of life’s origins than Dave Deamer. In First Life, his remarkably engaging, constantly lucid, and delightfully personal narrative, Deamer takes us behind the scenes of origins research as no one else could. What a story!”—Robert M. Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist, Carnegie Institution, and author of Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins "David Deamer has written a truly wonderful book. A preeminent scientist in the origin of life field, he has produced a synoptic, wise, and warmly human discussion. Anyone interested in how we came to exist in our universe had best read this book.”—Stuart Kauffman, author of At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity and Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

Hubble Focus: the Lives of Stars

Hubble Focus: the Lives of Stars PDF Author: NASA
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
INTRODUCTION This is part of a series called Hubble Focus. Each book presents some of Hubble's more recent and important ob- servations within a particular topic. The subjects span from our nearby solar system out to the horizon of Hubble's ob- servable universe. This book, Hubble Focus: The Lives of Stars, highlights some of Hubble's recent discoveries about the birth, evolution, and death of stars. Hubble's contributions are often in partnership with other space telescopes as well as those on the ground, and they build on decades of discoveries that came before Hubble's launch. Its findings are helping us under- stand how our universe has come to be the way it is today.