What causes a star to pulsate?

There are some binaries rotating around each other as short as just a few minutes.

It is the oldest star that we know of.

They're so weird.

Hello and welcome to the supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist

Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smithurst. Yeah, this month we're chatting all about weird and

wonderful stars. So what are the different types of stars in our universe? And crucially,

what are the odd balls out there? Because that's always what everyone wants to know it, right?

Absolutely. none of that

normal stuff no we want the extremes of the distributions please yes please thank you very much

and as always up to robert messie the deputy director of the royal astronomical society is here

so robert let's go from the very beginning how How do stars form? Yeah. So if you look at

the kind of contemporary universe, the contemporary galaxy, then you've got stars, obviously, across the

sky. And you'll also notice, particularly this time of year, actually, if you look for constellations

like Orion, you see these nebula dotted around as well. Now, if they're visible,

they tend to be bright clouds of gas that are glowing because the stars inside them, but those are

associated with denser, darker regions behind these clouds of hydrogen, mostly hydrogen,

with dust interspersed inside them as well. And if inside those, those are the stellar factories

or the stellar nurseries, the places where young stars are, and they're pulled together by gravity. So if you imagine if there's enough mass, if there's enough gas, and it gets a bit clumpy at all, if there's any structure in it, then that will tend over time to pull together. If you wait long enough, and sometimes also they get shocked by nearby supernovae, they get compressed that way too. If you wait long enough, as those things pull together, the gas heats up, the density increases, and I'm missing out a few steps and few details here, but it radiates heat. The temperature rises and it gets to the point where it's hot enough for nuclear fusion to happen. And a star is born, if you like. We're missing out of more

than a few details here. But that's the gist of it. So when you look at the night sky, if you look at something like the Orion Nebula in the winter sky, you can know that you're looking at a place where there are very, very many young stars that have formed in this way. Yeah, thanks, Robert. We'll catch it with you later in the show for some more questions. and this month's stargazing tips as well.

Now we know how all the stars are formed.

What can we see? in the show for some more questions and this month's stargazing tips as well. Now we know how all the

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