Lecture 3 - Why are the stars as they are ?
Why are the stars as they are? Sir Arthur Eddington showed how it is the fundamental laws of physics that define the basic characteristics of stars.
In the first lecture, we described stars as globes of gas in which the inward pull of gravity is balanced by the pressure of the gas. In this lecture, we shall describe Eddington's essential modification of this idea with the introduction of the pressure of the radiation trapped in the star. As we shall see, this theory was spectacularly successful in explaining several of the observed properties of stars.