The Never-Ending Story of a Star (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)

Presented by Renee Spiewak on Friday 20 September 2019. Like humans, stars often live their long lives in pairs, called binaries. At the end of their lives, they experience drastic transformations, rather than simply ending, and these transformations greatly affect their companions. In this lecture, I will take you on a journey of the many lives (and spectacular deaths/rebirths) of a massive star with a lighter companion star. The mass of a star, among other factors, determines the path it takes and the changes it experiences, and stars in binaries affect each other greatly. In a quiet stellar neighbourhood, this massive star will peacefully spend millions of years with its companion before undergoing a sudden transformation into one of the most extreme objects in the universe. Billions of years later, a second transformation will occur when the star’s companion quietly reaches the end of its life. However, under the right conditions, the pair’s story will not end there.

You can listen to The Never-Ending Story of a Star (Free Astronomy Public Lectures) online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

The Never-Ending Story of a Star (Free Astronomy Public Lectures) is an episode from Free Astronomy Public Lectures by Swinburne Commons.

This episode is 01:00:12 long.

This episode was published on Sep 20, 2019.

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