stellar evolution
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AI overview
Stars change dramatically over billions of years, going through different stages as they burn fuel and their properties shift—a process called stellar evolution. Understanding how stars change helps us explain what we see in the night sky today and predict what will happen to our own Sun in the future.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Article
A mass–radius (log) plot of several celestial bodies and their evolution
Stellar evolution is the process by which a star changes over the course of time. Depending on the mass of the star, its lifetime can range from a few million years for the most massive to trillions of years for the least massive, which is considerably longer than the current age of the universe. The table shows the lifetimes of stars as a function of their masses. All stars are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust, often called nebulae or molecular clouds. Over the course of millions of years, these protostars settle down into a state of equilibrium, becoming what is known as a main sequence star.