Ever wonder about the beginning? Well emanating from utter darkness was a loud BANG!

From this
was born the forever expanding existence of space, time and matter. All the millions of twinkling stars
you see at night are nothing but glowing super heated gas, unfathomably larger than any known
planets.

Let me tell you the story of these bright sparkling diamonds to which we own our existence. For we
are nothing but stardust! Oh its an exciting story involving traumatic birth, for the reason of its birth
soon becomes the reason of its death, and a catastrophic death!

In our quest to answer the basic questions of how, where, when and why, we need to search in the
suffocating swirling clouds of dust and gas spread in the interstellar medium. One such popular clouds
are pillars of creation. Often referred to as stellar nursery, as in its central regions baby stars are in the
process of being formed! Pillars of creation are part of the eagle nebula which is approximately seven
thousand light-years away from Earth. It constitutes of clouds of dust and hydrogen gas.

Remember you chemistry classes? Recalling the periodic table, you would know that hydrogen is the
light element known to us. Then closely follows helium and as we move lower down in the table we
find heavier elements. Hydrogen is the most abundant element and the key ingredient to forming
stars! Gravity is a force that is responsible for keeping us grounded on Earth, it is this very force that
bring together gases and begins to slowly coalesce into smaller clouds. This usually takes millions of
years! Each contracting gas can produce thousands of stars!

FUN FACT: Our very own star, the Sun, would have needed a clump of dust and gas, a thousand times
the size of our solar system!

At first the clouds are unbelievably cold, hundreds of degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but due to
gravity, when they start to coalesce, the compression causes the temperature to rise. In the centre
where the effect of gravity is most prominent and most mass is concentrated, the temperature rises to
a scorching two million degrees! This tiny glow is called a protostar. Although we age in a matter of
few years, stars have a different age scale altogether. After ten million years, the temperature of the
protostar soars past million degrees. Temperature as high as this provides ideal condition for a process
called NUCLEAR REACTION. More specifically the star undergoes thermonuclear fusion. Which is a
fancy way of saying that lighter elements like hydrogen start to combine to form heavier elements like
helium.

This nuclear reaction is stars energy source, its food and water. This causes the star to be luminous.
Now gravity is still there trying to contract the star, it but the energy released from the nuclear
reaction opposes gravity and pushes outwards. Stars try to withhold the gravitational collapse, the
heat from the reaction causes the particles of the gas to move quickly and randomly. They bang
outwards which produces a pressure that actually holds the star up against gravity. When the
conditions are just right, these two antagonistic forces balance themselves and thats when we get a
star like Sun. A Main Sequence star.
Main Sequence is a state of equilibrium in which the gravitational pull is countered by the outward
pressure. In this phase of the star, it provides us with the energy we use to sustain our daily life. Not all
main sequence stars are alike, they may have varying sizes and temperature. We can deduce how hot a
star is by judging the colour of light it emits. It is given by a famous formula called the Weins
Displacement Law.

The size of the star often determines how quickly a star dies. Larger the stars, more quickly it dies. But
one may argue that larger stars have more fuel to burn, hence should live longer. But the truth is, the
more mass you have, higher the temperature, higher the fusion rate, higher the pressure. Hence the
rate at which you are consuming the energy is also higher. A star may have a longer life or a shorter life
but ultimately, comes the impending doom, all stars die.

It can only survive until it does not run out of fuel. Once fuel is over, gravity wins, and star collapses.
Size of a star is also important to predict the death of a star. Massive stars often make a spectacle of
their deaths, they go out in a cataclysmic blast, spreading across thousands of miles. This dust then
cools eventually and coalesces into planets and moons.

Smaller stars simply fade away out of existence. Its been five billion years since our sun, has been
happily burning its fuel. It has been predicted that five billion years later our sun too will reach its end,
when all the hydrogen is exhausted.

It is a possibility that the core of Sun, which will be entirely helium, (as hydrogen atoms fuse to form
helium atoms) would need to find a new source of energy. Until it find the new sources, the star will
continue collapsing, but because of inwards pull and pressure, the temperature would once again rise
and if it is hot enough to start helium fusion, it may once again live. But many argue Sun may not be
able to fuse helium into heavier atoms like carbon and oxygen, thats because its harder to get the
helium nuclei close together and overcome the strong nuclear force between the atoms and cause
from to fuse.

In stars much larger than the sun, the pressure can be large enough to cause the core to heat up
sufficiently (hundred and eighty million degrees) to allow helium to fuse into carbon and so on. The
heat from helium causes the outer layers of the star to spread out even more which is seen as star
getting expanded. Since the outer layers are so far away from the core, it is weakly held by gravity and
can be blown away from interstellar winds. It will actually eject the outer envelope of gases which are
only weakly held by gravity that'll send some shells of gas outward illuminated by the hot central star
and that will cause what's called the planetary nebula phenomenon. They appear to us as beautiful
display of colours.

A star like our sun, dies by ejecting its outer layers with no nuclear reactions to generate outward
pressure, gravity gains the upper hand. The star begins to collapse in on itself. But giving it another
lifeline, are the mysterious electrons. These tiny negatively charged atomic particles don't like being
compressed so they're very close to one another because electrons effectively don't like each other. If
you compact the electrons hard enough, the pressure of the electrons themselves is able to hold up
the star against gravity. When the core of our dying sun-like star is crushed to about the size of the
earth, this so-called electron degeneracy pressure takes over. Gravity can collapse the star no further.
It's left to slowly cool into a bizarre stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. Like the Sirius B which can
be seen only faintly aside its companion Sirius the brightest star in our sky. Now a white dwarf is avery
strange type of star. It's very very dense. The white dwarf has about 300,000 times the mass of the
earth compressed into a volume the size of the earth. If you had just a teaspoon full of material, it
would weigh several tons. A white dwarf is the final stage in the life of a sun-like star, but it's not quite
dead yet. It will continue to shine for billions of years as it gradually radiates away a lifetime of energy.
I like to call white dwarfs retired stars in the sense that all of the light that they are shining is energy
that they accumulated during their normal lives as stars while they were fusing light elements into
heavy elements as our Sun is doing right now. So it's spending its life savings, it's a retired star.

Unlike the smaller star, the massive stars can undergo fusion for longer durations fusing hydrogen into
helium, then helium into carbon and oxygen andoxygen into neon and magnesium and then silicon and
sulphur and then iron the massive star builds up a core of iron. The fusion into heavier elements
consumes more energy as opposed to liberation of energy. Once the iron core has formed, it becomes
unstable and when it is shrinks to a size of one and a half times our sun, it undergoes a violent collapse.
Collapse of iron core sends off the outer layers blowing out into the interstellar sea. This is often
termed as supernova. All the elements you see around on earth has come from explosions such as
these.

From bigger stars, gravity actually finds a way of defeating that tendency the electrons have to push
each other apart by combining the electrons with the protons and turning them into neutrons. Now
what is formed is a neutron star. It is much harder to persuade the neutrons to combine and hence
the collapse stops. As opposed to the other objects, neutron stars are cosmic pebbles, stretching 10
miles across.

Imagine if you take a star about one-and-a-half times the size of our Sun and then you compress all of
that material down into a very small space, that is now a neutron star. Squeezing that amount of mass
into such a small space makes for a very dense object. One teaspoonful of neutron star material would
weigh a billion tons. If a human being were to stand on the neutron star it would be a somewhat
uncomfortable experience. On earth if they weighed about 70 kilograms, on a neutron star they would
weigh something like 10 billion tons and our biology can't stand that amount of pressure, so a human
being would essentially be squashed flat against the surface of thestar. In addition to that, neutron
stars are spinning at an incredibly high rate hundreds of times per second in some cases. Ironically this
rapid spinning enabled astronomers to first identify neutron stars.

These rapidly spinning neutron stars have a really amazingly high magnetic field and that magnetic
field together with the spin forces a bunch of charged particles electrons to go along the axis of the
magnetic field and those accelerated electrons give off light. They produce a well-focused beam of
light. Much like a lighthouse, you can only see the beam when its pointing right at you. That object is
called a pulsar.

Stars that are even more massive perhaps 25 or 40 times the mass of the Sun have a different future.
Not even a neutron star can hold up under the weight of their collapse and gravity will crush them
even further into an object of infinite density and almost equally limitless fascination. A black hole. A
black hole essentially represents the ultimate death of a star, a blackhole is basically gravity's victory
over mass. It is the complete collapse of a very massive star which creates a region of space where
matter is compressed into such a high density that its gravitational field is inescapable. Nothing can
escape from them not even the fastest moving thing we know of which is light. A common
misperception is that black holes just go sucking up everything in the universe that's actually not true.
Now objects that are very close to blackholes do get sucked in but if you'recomfortably far away with
the proper trajectory you won't get sucked in.
But there is yet another class of supernovae involving even bigger stars and even more powerful
explosions. A collapse so catastrophic that it leaves behind no remnant, not even a blackhole but no
one had ever seen one until a few years ago. In 2006, astronomers observed the largest stellar
explosion ever witnessed by man. 240 million light years away from Earth a massive star blew itself
apart. The total energy emitted was 100 times as much as the energy of a normal massive explosion. A
normal supernova comes from the explosion of a star ten times more massive than our Sun. But this
humongous explosion seems to have signalled the death of a star 150 or even 200 times more massive.
That's about as massive as a star can get.

Studying such explosions can actually teach us a lot about the first stars that ever existed. It is
theorised that the first generation of stars tended to be really massive and they exploded by this
mechanism of a mega explosion that likely seeded the early universe with heavy elements. These
extremely massive stars are the largest iron factories in the universe. A single star 150 times the mass
of the sun can produce 20 or 25 solar masses of iron. As these high mass stars die such spectacular
deaths producing heavy elements in the core, they plant the seeds of the next generations of stars
with the likelihood that that next generation will have planets that contain the ingredients of life itself.

Supernovas aren't the only energetic events in the life and death of a star. Right now, across the
universe there are a thousand pairs of stars engaged in brilliant dances of fire. For some this dance will
end in catastrophe. We cannot see stars collide. As a pair of stars draw close enough to collide, it
would just be a single dot of light even in the largest telescopes. Using computer models
astrophysicists can take any two types of stars and find out what happens if they become involved in a
stellar smash-up. Among the most explosive collisions modelled by astrophysicists is the clash of two
orbiting neutron stars.

Typically, they're bound together as a pair orbiting one another disturbing the space-time around them
and creating waves of energy. The energy to do that slows the Stars down so they get closer and closer
together. As they get really close together they're orbiting around hundreds or even a thousand times
per second. The final event is very dramatic. When two neutron stars collide, they're moving at nearly
the speed of light. The final collision takes only a fraction of a second but unleashes more energy than
the Sun will generate in its entire lifetime. We can also predict what would happen if a highly dense
white dwarf collided with our Sun. It would be afrightening collision.

Fortunately, the chances of this happening are slim because the sun is in a very uncrowded part of the
Milky Way galaxy. Because the space between the stars is so great there is not much chance of a
collision. But there are places within galaxies where the odds of a collision are much greater. Regions
where hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars are crowded together by gravity into a globular
cluster. Within a globular cluster stars are packed a million times more densely than elsewhere in the
Milky Way. In the Milky Way, everybody is going in the same direction but in the globular cluster
there's no organized motion. In these crowded chaotic conditions stars collide on average once every
10,000 years. Because of this high rate of collision, we dont expect to see any young stars. But
strangely a globular cluster usually conceals some mysterious strangers. Large blue stars far younger
than the small dim stars surrounding them. These seemingly impossible stars are known as blue
stragglers. The mystery of blue stragglers is that they're in some sense younger than they've any right
to be. All of the stars of that mass and that luminosity would have died off billions of years ago in these
clusters. So where did these things come from how did they get into these star clusters?
Blue stragglers are the result of collisions between older dimmer main-sequence stars like our sun. This
collision is actually relatively gentle. The mutual gravity of the Stars locks them in a spiral. They've lost
energy of motion and they will come back and have multiple subsequent passages. They heat up and
swell up and begin spiralling around each other coming closer and closer until they finally come
together and the Stars merge. In the end, rather than triggering a catastrophe the two stars merge to
form one more massive star. Basically, youre taking two small old stars piling them together to make a
new star which is twice as massive and therefore it's brighter and bluer than the rest of the stars in the
cluster.

Black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs all represent the end of remarkable stellar lives. But there
are other strange celestial objects that never got a chance to shine. Not quite planets, not quite stars,
these are called brown dwarfs. Brown dwarf is basically a failed star. It has the same ingredients as a
star but it just doesnt have enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion. Stars produced a lot of light they're
very easy to see from a distance. Having a very low temperature brown dwarfs emit very little light
meaning we can only see them if they're very close to us. If something is born with less than eight
percent the mass of the Sun, then it can't produce its own energy and without fusion these failed stars
start to act more like planets.

If you were flying in a spaceship across the surface of a star you wouldn't really see anything that
looked like clouds or mountains but when you go to a brown dwarf, things begin to change. It is
believed that their atmospheres in some ways might be comparable to very massive versions of the
planet Jupiter having similar banding structures and clouds on the surface as seen in pictures of
Jupiter. Although we've never taken a picture of the surface of a brown dwarf. These clouds aren't the
normal kinds like we know about on the earth. They are made up of iron vapor and may get thick
enough that you get iron droplets raining out of the clouds. Obviously, a person wouldn't want to be
there because these are molten iron.

To date astronomers have located only a couple hundred brown dwarfs and they still have many
questions about these elusive objects. For one they know some brown dwarfs have discs of dust and
gas around them. Might those discs form into planets? That's just one of many mysteries yet to be
solved as we continue to probe the Stars. But already science has revealed the universe to be a magical
realm of dwarfs and Giants, stragglers and supernovas and hidden within the explosive life story of
stars they have found the very history of the cosmos and a key to understanding our own origins.