Sub-Sections

Birth
Life of a Sun-Like Star
Life of a Giant Star
Stellar Types & the H-R Diagram
Open Star Clusters
Globular Star Clusters
Dead Stars

Stars

A tour of what we know about stars is the focus of this section of the site. This is meant to be a fairly broad overview of stars and does not get into specific features of stars such as sunspots, flares, helioseismology, and stellar structure. Much of that is discussed on the page about the Sun, instead.

The first page of this site discusses stellar birth, going from a nebula to a full-fledged hydrogen-fusing star.

The second and third pages discuss how a Sun-like and a giant star spend most of their lives. The reason these are divided into two different pages is that the size (and therefore temperature) of a star will alter how it fuses hydrogen and the end-of-life stages it will go through.

The fourth section, "Stellar Types & the H-R Diagram" (short for Hertzaprung-Russel), covers how we classify stars and the power of that classification system.

The next two pages cover the two types of clusters of stars - Open and Globular. Both are very different astronomical phenomena with very different uses.

The final section, "Dead Stars," discusses the three main types of stars that are no longer actively producing energy: White Dwarfs (the type our Sun will turn into), Neutron Stars, and the enigmatic Black Holes.