Ep. 787: Evolved Stars (They're not dead yet!)

Astronomy Cast

Natural Sciences, Science, Astronomy

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2026

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Astronomy Cast Ep. 787: Evolved Stars (They're not dead yet!) By Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay Streamed live on Mar 16, 2026. Main sequence stars spend most of their time being… normal. Fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores. Producing radiation. But as their stockpiles of hydrogen run out they switch to other fuels, starting to climb the ladder of the periodic table of elements. And this is when things get weird. As we get more and more observations of the cosmos, our understanding gets more detailed. In this episode we look at all the ways a star can die and the updates that we've learned in the past 20 years of Astronomy Cast. Image Credit: NASA Galex This show is supported through people like you on Patreon.com/AstronomyCast In this episode, we'd like to thank: Burry Gowen, Eric Lee, Jeanette Wink, Michael Purcell, Andrew Poelstra, David, David Rossetter, Ed, Gerhard Schwarzer, Jason Kwong, Joe McTee, Sergey Manouilov, Siggi Kemmler, Sergio Sancevero

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm
0:02.0	Oh Thank you. I'm Astronomycast, Episode 787, Evolved Stars.
0:53.6	Welcome to Astronomycast from weekly Facts based journey through the cosmos.
0:56.5	We hope you understand only what we know, but how we know what we know.
0:59.3	I'm Fraser Kane.
0:59.9	I'm the publisher of the Universe Today.
1:01.5	With me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest.
1:07.9	Hello, Pamela.
1:10.0	Hi.
1:10.7	How are you doing, Fraser? I'm doing well.
1:14.9	See, you know, since someone said, oh yeah, Pamela always says, I, I'm doing well. I always has
1:20.0	that stutter there. I've decided I'm just going to mix up the intros every time. You need to
1:24.1	get out of the rot. You need to be shaken up and just exist in this sort of place where you can no longer find any firm footing.
1:32.6	That the future will be unbounded and unstable.
1:36.8	This is my guarantee.
1:38.5	At least the greetings I provide to you will be anything but a certainty.
1:44.3	As long as it's shaken and not stirred, we're good.
1:46.4	There you go.
1:47.4	So this is an interesting anniversary for me, which is that we are at about the one-year mark
1:52.7	from when Universe Today removed all of the advertisements from the website.
1:57.6	Or when I removed all the advertisements from the Universe Today website anyway we went ad
2:02.3	free across our entire existence yeah and instead just relied on people to join our Patreon and we're
	...

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