Imagine that you are observing a star and you find the wavelength of peak emission for the star to be 400 nm. What would the wavelength of peak emission be for a new star that has a surface temperature that is a quarter of the original star?
Stellar evolution
We may see thousands of stars in the dark sky. Our universe consists of billions of stars. Stars may appear tiny to us but they are huge balls of gasses. Sun is a star of average size. Some stars are even a thousand times larger than the sun. The stars do not exist forever they have a certain lifetime. The life span of the sun is about 10 billion years. The star undergoes various changes during its lifetime, this process is called stellar evolution. The structure of the sun-like star is shown below.
Red Shift
It is an astronomical phenomenon. In this phenomenon, increase in wavelength with corresponding decrease in photon energy and frequency of radiation of light. It is the displacement of spectrum of any kind of astronomical object to the longer wavelengths (red) side.
- Imagine that you are observing a star and you find the wavelength of peak emission for the star to be 400 nm. What would the wavelength of peak emission be for a new star that has a surface temperature that is a quarter of the original star?
- Using the same pair of stars from the first question, how does the luminosity (the energy output) of each star compare if we assume that both stars are the same size? (Please provide a specific factor or proportion)
- What type of
radiation /light (from theelectromagnetic spectrum) is each star emitting? - Now imagine that we determine that the wavelength of peak emission of the original star was determined to be bluer than it should be based on other observations. Would this indicate that the star is moving towards us or away from us relatively speaking through space? (Hint: think of the Doppler effect)
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