Stellar Wind - Solar Wind, Massive Hot Stars, Baby Stars, Dying Stars, Mass Loss - Stellar winds
gentle earth distant produce
The sun emits a constant stream of particles, mostly protons and electrons, that are known as the solar wind. Many stars also have a similar phenomenon, known as stellar wind. The solar wind is fairly gentle. Stellar winds as gentle as the solar wind are difficult to detect from the earth because other stars are so distant. However, many stars at certain stages in their evolution have very strong stellar winds. These strong winds produce effects that we can observe from Earth. They also can cause the star to lose significant amounts of mass.
Analogous to the solar wind many stars have stellar winds. Because stars are so distant, stellar winds that are as gentle as the solar wind do not produce dramatic effects as seen from the earth. The stellar winds that we observe are therefore much stronger than the solar wind. A variety of different types of stars display interesting stellar winds.
Additional Topics
The hottest, most massive stars are O spectral class stars, which have at least 15 times the mass of the sun. Wolf-Rayet stars have many characteristics in common with the O stars, but their nature is still not completely understood. Both O stars and Wolf-Rayet stars often have very strong stellar winds. The surface temperatures of O stars are above 30,000 degrees Kelvin. Their stellar winds can b…
The sun and similar stars form from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. After the star forms, the leftover material still surrounds it in a cocoon of gas and dust. How do stars like the sun shed their cocoons? One way is stellar winds. Astronomers think that shortly after the sun formed it went through a period when it had a very strong solar wind, which helped blow away the cocoon. It is difficult…
Old stars in the process of dying can also have very strong stellar winds. When stars like the sun exhaust the hydrogen fueling their nuclear fires, they expand into red giants. A typical red giant is about the size of the earth's orbit around the sun. Because red giants are so large and the gravitational force decreases with distance from the center, the gravitational force at the surface …
The single most important property affecting the evolution of a star is its mass. Therefore when the stellar wind causes a star to lose mass, its evolution is affected. In some cases these effects are still poorly understood. One reasonably well understood effect occurs for red giants collapsing into white dwarfs as described above. A star having more than 1.4 times the mass of the sun can not col…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments