Neutron Stars, White Dwarfs, Brown Dwarfs And More Aren't Actually Stars
;-) "excerpt" for personal use / handy reference ~~~~
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Neutron Stars, White Dwarfs, Brown Dwarfs And More Aren't Actually Stars
Sep 25, 2018,10:00am EDT
Ethan Siegel
The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.
PICTURE CAPTION: A neutron star is one of the densest collections of matter in the Universe, but there is an upper limit to their mass. Exceed it, and the neutron star will further collapse to form a black hole. Neither neutron stars nor black holes, despite their mass, can be considered stars.
ESO/LUÍS CALÇADA
When it comes to stars, there's a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is nothing spectacular, as there are stars both redder and bluer, brighter and dimmer, and more-or-less massive by great amounts. While our Sun will live a total of around 10-12 billion years, some stars may live up to trillions of years, while others will explode or collapse after mere millions. The diversity among stars is enormous.
And yet, many of the objects in the Universe we call stars — like white dwarf stars, brown dwarf stars, neutron stars and more — aren't actually stars at all. In order to be a star, you need to do more than simply give off light from across the galaxy. Here's why, according to astronomy, a huge set of objects we call "stars" don't make the cut.
PICTURE CAPTION: After approximately five to seven billion years more, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen in its core. The interior will contract, heat up, and eventually helium fusion will begin. At this point, the Sun will swell, vaporize Earth's atmosphere, and char whatever's left of our surface. But it is now, and will be then, a star. ESO / LUÍS CALÇADA
Take a look inside our Sun. What do you find? Much like Earth, Jupiter, or any very massive object, it's made up of layers, each of which has different properties. The outermost layers of the Sun's photosphere are hot at a few thousand Kelvin, but deep inside the inner layers the temperature rises tremendously. All the heat generated in the star's core has to make its way to the surface to escape, but with so many particles inside, almost all of which are ionized, it can take hundreds of thousands of years for a photon to get out.
The deeper in you go, towards the center of the Sun, the hotter it gets. About halfway down to the core, an important temperature threshold is reached: 4 million K. It's here that the star-like nature of our Sun reveals itself.
Our Sun isn't a star because it's massive enough, nor because it's bright enough, nor because it's hot enough, although it certainly is all of those things. Mass, luminosity, and temperature are necessary parameters of a star, but each of them on their own isn't sufficient to make a star. True stars have something special going on inside of them: they fuse raw protons into helium in their core.
PICTURE CAPTION: The most straightforward and lowest-energy version of the proton-proton chain, which produces helium-4 from initial hydrogen fuel. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS USER SARANG
This requires temperatures of about 4 million K to get going, where higher temperatures simply increase the reaction rate. Our Sun's core reaches a maximum of 15 million K, which explains why it's about a thousand times brighter than a star that's at that lower temperature of 4 million K. A star that's even brighter and hotter than the Sun might be thousands or even millions of times more luminous than the Sun; fusion reactions are highly temperature-dependent.
PICTURE CAPTION: The classification system of stars by color and magnitude is very useful. By surveying our local region of the Universe, we find that only 5% of stars are as massive (or more) than our Sun is. It is thousands of times as luminous as the dimmest red dwarf star, but the most massive O-stars are millions of times as luminous as our Sun. KIEFF/LUCASVB OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / E. SIEGEL
Stars below about 40% of the Sun's mass will only fuse hydrogen into helium; they cannot contract and heat up to fuse helium into anything heavier. Stars that are massive enough, like our Sun, will fuse helium into carbon when the core runs out of hydrogen, and stars more than about 8 times as massive as the Sun will go onto fuse carbon into oxygen and still heavier elements. Any star undergoing fusion based on hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, or heavier elements counts as a star. This includes red dwarfs, Sun-like stars, red and blue giants and supergiants, and every single point of stellar light you can see with your eyes in the night sky.
PICTURE CAPTION: A composite image of the first exoplanet ever directly imaged (red) and its brown dwarf parent star, as seen in the infrared. A true star would be much physically larger and higher in mass than the brown dwarf shown here. EUROPEAN SOUTHERN OBSERVATORY (ESO)
But it doesn't include every object that has "star" in its name. This deliberately excludes objects that can fuse certain heavy isotopes of hydrogen and helium at lower temperatures, for example. Brown dwarf stars are object more than about 13 times the mass of Jupiter but lower in mass than a true red dwarf star, and can fuse deuterium and sometimes lithium, but never reach that threshold necessary to fuse hydrogen into helium. For objects in this temperature range — where the cores are hotter than 1 million K but below 4 million K — we often consider brown dwarfs to be failed stars, in the sense that if they became more massive and heated up, they could have been low-mass stars, after all.
Two low-mass brown dwarfs, in fact, may someday merge to create a true star.
PICTURE CAPTION: These are the two brown dwarfs that make up Luhman 16, and they may eventually merge together to create a star. NASA/JPL/GEMINI OBSERVATORY/AURA/NSF
There are also classes of objects that are still in the process of forming: protostars. Someday in the future, these will likely become stars, as they begin fusing hydrogen into helium in their core. But long before that happens, a large, massive molecular cloud of gas needs to collapse, and this is a problem if you think about energy.
A cloud of gas has lots of potential energy; if it collapsed under its own gravity, it would convert that into some other form of energy. That energy needs to be radiated away to make a stable, contracted object, like a star. So what happens? It has to release energy in the form of light and heat. These protostars, therefore, can illuminate the cosmos just like stars can, but they get their energy from gravitational collapse, rather than from fusion.
PICTURE CAPTION: The very young protostar M17-SO1, as imaged with the Subaru telescope. This newly-forming object will someday become a star, but is not yet one. SUBARU / NAOJ
In most cases, these protostars will go on to become true stars, as the fusion of protons into helium (and, potentially, beyond) will occur. But for 10 to 15 million years, the conversion of gravitational energy into electromagnetic energy is what powers them. Stars that are Sun-like (no more than double the Sun's mass) are known as T Tauri stars; more massive ones are Herbig stars. Both of these are misnomers, however, since they lack the fusion necessary to be classed as true stars.
They'll almost always get there, eventually, but just as an egg is not a chicken, a protostar is not yet a star.
PICTURE CAPTION: The observational structure of the young star MWC 758, at right, compared with a simulation involving a large outer planet, at left. This Herbig star is much more massive than our Sun ever was, but also is not a true star. NASA, ESA, ESO, M. BENISTY ET AL. (UNIVERSITY OF GRENOBLE), R. DONG (LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY), AND Z. ZHU (PRINCETON UNIVERSITY)
Finally, there are the remains of stars. Sun-like stars will end their lives in a white dwarf phase, where the used-up core of stellar fuel contracts down to no bigger than the size of planet Earth. These objects will remain hot and luminous for hundreds of trillions of years, but they generate no new energy of their own. They simply shine based on the energy they were born with, when the stars that created them died. White dwarf stars — and their far-future versions known as black dwarfs — are stellar remnants, rather than true stars themselves.
Even when matter accretes on the surface of a white dwarf and flares up with fusion, creating a nova, it cannot be considered a star. Stars have fusion occur in their core; surface fusion simply will not do.
PICTURE CAPTION: The nova of the star GK Persei, shown here in an X-ray (blue), radio (pink), and optical (yellow)... [+] X-RAY: NASA/CXC/RIKEN/D.TAKEI ET AL; OPTICAL: NASA/STSCI; RADIO: NRAO/VLA
Most spectacular is the neutron star, created by the massive implosion of a supernova's core. Up to 2.5 solar masses of material can be collected in a sphere just a few kilometers in radius, spinning at up to 2/3rds the speed of light. Denser than an atomic nucleus, a neutron star is one of the most extreme objects the Universe has to offer, and neutron star-neutron star collisions give rise to the majority of the heaviest elements in the Universe today.
Yet despite its name, a neutron star is no star at all, but a stellar remnant. Like the other stellar remnants, like the protostars, and like the failed stars, simply putting "star" in its name doesn't make it so. Without nuclear fusion in its core, a neutron star is no less spectacular, but it is not a star.
PICTURE CAPTION: A neutron star, despite being mostly made of neutral particles, produces the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe. When neutron stars merge, they should produce both gravitational waves and also electromagnetic signatures, and when they cross a threshold of about 2.5 to 3 solar masses (depending on spin), they can become black holes in under a second. NASA / CASEY REED - PENN STATE UNIVERSITY
There is a lesson here that all scientists should be aware of: it doesn't matter how you name or classify something that you're studying. Rather, it matters that you understand the properties that it does and doesn't have. Whether you classify Pluto as a planet or not isn't what's important; understanding its physical and orbital properties are. Whether you classify a virus as life or non-life isn't nearly as important as understanding its structures, functions, and impacts on the environment and the organisms within it. Not every object with "star" in its name fuses hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, or heavier elements into still heavier ones, but white dwarfs, neutron stars, brown dwarfs, and protostars are no less spectacular for it. Not everything is a star, and that's a good thing. Every object plays its own unique role in the cosmic story that's created us.
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