What dictates the difference between a star with a short, bright existence and one that glows steadily for trillions of years?
Answer
The star's mass
The variation in a star's mass dictates its entire lifetime; more massive stars fuse fuel intensely for a shorter time, while lower-mass stars sip fuel slowly, becoming stable main sequence stars for billions or trillions of years.
#Videos
How Do Stars Produce Light? - Physics Frontier - YouTube
Related Questions
What critical core temperature must be reached for nuclear fusion to commence in a star?What is the initial, ultra-high-frequency light product generated immediately by nuclear fusion in a star's core?How long can it take for an energetic photon to finally escape the interior of the Sun?What dictates the difference between a star with a short, bright existence and one that glows steadily for trillions of years?What is the term used for the average color of all starlight observed across the entire universe?What process allows astronomers to determine precisely which elements are present in a star via spectroscopy?What is one of the two primary factors that resolve Olbers' Paradox regarding the dark night sky?What generates the light emitted by a white dwarf after it has exhausted its fusion fuel?What mechanism is responsible for the faint glow observed from brown dwarfs?What phenomenon causes starlight to exhibit polarization when observed on Earth?Who first categorized stars into visual brightness categories ranging from first-magnitude to sixth-magnitude?What process causes the material approaching a black hole to shine brightly, often in X-ray light?