Stellar Evolution, Supernovae and the Fate of the Sun

2021/08/19 に公開
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This is the ninth lecture series of my complete online introductory undergraduate college course. This video series was used at William Paterson University and CUNY Hunter in online classes as well as to supplement in-person course material. Notes and links are present in the videos at the start of each lecture.

0:00:00 - Evolution of Solar Mass Stars
0:47:35 - The Evolution of High Mass Stars
1:29:14 - Core-Collapse Supernovae
1:54:01 - (turn down your headphones. something happened...)
2:20:13 - Supernova Remnants

The Sun will live and die. I discuss its fate and the fate of stars with lower mass than the Sun. Along the way, we learn about red giants, helium fusion, white dwarfs, planetary nebulae, and exactly what will happen to our home Earth in about 5 billion years. Next, I explore the evolution of high mass stars. High mass stars evolve much more rapidly, and their endings are extraordinary. They are responsible for many of the elements that make up your body! The evolution of elements in the cores of high mass stars leads us to what exactly happens in the moments of their deaths. We then talk about core-collapse supernovae. When massive stars die, they go out with a huge bang. They seed the cosmos with their remains. The process by which they die is catastrophic and astonishing. Learning about Stellar Evolution of massive stars, we explore the violent Type II Supernova. They explode when they try to fuse iron and nickel in their core, but cannot, because these reactions and others near and past the "Iron Peak" have Binding Energies that are lower than for less-massive elements and isotopes. We examine Supernova 1987a as an odd example. Finally, we look at their trailings, the supernova remnants. I’ll look in detail at the results of the labors of the most massive stars in the cosmos, and some of the most beautiful sights in a telescope. The remnants of supernova explosions. We look at historical supernovae, as well as the closest, most recent one. We even learn what we might see in our Winter skies sometime very soon, when Betelguese blows up.

WOOPS LIST!
In the third lecture,
1) I made a bungle in speaking. Neither nickel-58 nor nickel-62 are radioactive. Nickel-58 actually makes up 68% of nickel.
2) Be sure to plug your ears at @24:49 - bit of an audio super-nova