this amazed me?

Question

i found this vid on youtube with the size of planets and stars...amazing

http://youtube.com/watch?v=z6yHKE9dg0g

how do stars get so big? i mean RIDICULOUSLY BIG. im guessin some of those stars in the end r in the proccess of "dying" or "burning out" am i correct? if not then how is it soo big without burning out? how big WILL it be wen it does?

lindajune im sry but i dont think u answered my question...or maybe u did and im jus not gettin it lol im not a genius. but u say our sun is about average. well if u actually watched the vid the stars after the sun are a LOT bigger. like RIDCULOUSLY bigger. im not talkin 50 times here a lot more than that. the last star in the vid is over 3.5 trillion kilometers (i think they mean in diameter but not sure cuz it doesnt tell)

our sun is barely even a flea compared to those other stars

Answer 1

Cool video, thanks! I'm bookmarking that one.

Yep, Betelguese (and I believe Arctarus) are in the process of dying - they are in the red giant phase. Our Sun will swell up like that as well (although not that big!). Sirius and Rigel, not to mention the Cephieds, are giant O and B class stars - many many times the mass of our Sun. They are still in the mid-points of their lives, as far as we can tell, but will use up their fuel much more quickly than a smaller star like the Sun, and explode in a supernova when they die. It will definitely be something to see!

Our Sun will swell up to have a radius about the size of the Earth's orbit when it becomes a red giant - but it won't explode. It WILL engulf the Earth though. Don't worry, that's still about 5 billion years away.

Answer 2

Stars are a collection of gases.

When a star begins it's life, it is a ball of hydrogen, so large that the gas exerts gravity, the ball of gas shrinks, and temperatures go up in the core to such an extent that fusion begins. Hydrogen is fuzed into helium, releasing energy and a photon, and most, but not all of the helium breaks up back into hydrogen.

As a star ages, it accumulates more and more waste products (the helium), which poisons the fusion reaction. The trapped heat then causes the shell (the outer portions) of the star to expand, which allows the helium to fuse into Carbon.
This is known as a red giant.

Stars that start life larger than our sun begin life as a Blue Giant, then go to Red Supergiant stage.

Red giants eventually fuse all of the helium, and contract, becomming white dwarfs, while they fuse carbon into iron.
When a white dwarf finally exausts all of the carbon, it becoms a brown dwarf.

Red supergiants and blue supergiants can nova, or explode, during one of their expansion phases. The stellar core will then form either a neutron star (of one of several varieties, depending on spin rate), or a black hole, if they have enough initial mass.

Nebulas are the outer shells of the stars blown off during an explosion or a contraction.

Hope this helps.

P.S.: When the Sun turns into a red giant (about 5 billion years from now), it's outer layers will pass the orbit of Mars. The Earth will be toast long before that, however.

Answer 3

It all depends on your definition of "ridiculously big".
The sun is ridiculously big compared to the Earth, but the Earth is ridiculously big compared to a small rock.

How long a star lives depends on how much mass it has to start with - the bigger the star the faster it burns its fuel.
Our star, a little smaller than average, has a lifespan of about 10 billion years (its middle-aged right now).
But stars that are 50 times as massive as our sun may only live a billion years or so.
When stars burn hydrogen it produces helium as the "ash". When the hydrogen is gone, the star burns the helium, aqnd the ash is carbon. Then when the helium runs out the star burns the carbon...and so on.
At some point, depending on the mass of the star, it ends up with iron as an "ash" product and that's where it stops - burning iron takes more energy than it produces.
So massive stars end up exploding (called supernovas).
But stars like our sun don't get that far - when it starts burning helium it swells up into what is called a "red giant" - that's the start of the end of our sun's normal life. Eventually it will simply shrink into a white dwarf star and start cooling off.

Answer 4

Orion is an easily visible constellation. One of the stars that makes up Orion is name Betelgeuse(sp?). It is a red giant. If it occupied the position of our sun, it's size would extend to beyond the orbit of the planet Mars. That's big. Some stars are big. Even our Sun is big as it is visible as a resolved disk not a point of light by the naked eye (when the sun is low on the horizon or you wear special eye wear). The sun's size (apparent) is about the same as the moon even though the moon is 240,000 miles away whereas the sun is 93,000,000 miles away.

Answer 5

It's a pretty impressive video.
Mass and size are two different things.
Average primordial stars are about 20 solar masses.
the maximum is about 150 solar masses
When they near the end of their life cycle and expand the original mass decides the size.

Answer 6

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Answer 7

I didn't know all the planets and stars were lined up like that. And that little song plays in outer space all the time! Cool!

Answer 8

hows this for size,for every grain of sand on the earth there are 1 million stars(suns) up there.

Answer 9

do you know something
this video is 3D
so the calculating of the volume of these stars is fake not real

Answer 10

You're right.
The largest are the "Red Giants".
They are in their later stages.