Stellar Composition
Listen now
Description
Transcript: Most stars are very different in chemical composition from you, or I, or the material on the Earth. The Sun for example, of every 10 thousand atoms has 74 hundred hydrogen atoms, 24 hundred helium atoms, and 150 or so corresponding to all the other elements in the periodic table; for example, there are only three carbon atoms, two nitrogen atoms, and five oxygen atoms out of that 10 thousand. Contrast that with human material which of course is mostly water. Out of every 10 thousand atoms in the human body 62 hundred are hydrogen, 11 hundred carbon, 200 nitrogen, and 25 hundred oxygen; only two are helium. Humans have vastly more carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen than typical stellar material.
More Episodes
Transcript: Since light has a finite speed, three hundred thousand kilometers per second, there’s an inevitable consequence called light travel time. In terrestrial environments light essentially travels instantly or appears to travel fast. The finite speed of light, three hundred thousand...
Published 07/24/11
Transcript: Some stars in the sky, somewhat hotter than the Sun with temperatures of 5 thousand to 10 thousand Kelvin, have very low luminosities in the range of one-hundredth to one-thousandth the Sun’s luminosity. Application of the Stephan-Boltzmann Law shows that they must be physically...
Published 07/24/11
Transcript: Certain rare stars in the sky with either red or blue colors are extremely luminous, up to a million times the luminosity of the Sun. Application of the Stephan-Boltzmann Law shows that their sizes must be in the range of ten to a thousand times the size of the Sun. These...
Published 07/24/11