Lecture 12 - Life history of stars – Intermediate mass stars
The Pleiades, an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus, is a familiar object to sky-watchers. The existence of 7-8 solar mass stars in main sequence, as observed in the Pleiades, provides a vital clue to the life-history of intermediate-mass stars. This lecture discusses the life history of intermediate mass stars, and explains how earlier ideas about the final phase of these stars needed to be modified because of such observations.
The evolution of stars with masses between three solar mass to ten solar mass is very different from the life history of low mass stars. In these stars, there is no ‘safety valve’ to prevent a catastrophic explosion when carbon, the result of helium fusion, becomes hot enough to fuse. Recent ideas on how these stars save themselves, and their final resting ground, will be discussed.