For millennia, the little dots of light peppering our sky have captured human curiosity. We called the skies above the heavens, evocative of a land where gods reside. As humanity advanced, we began to learn more things about the cosmos above. The heavens were a busy place, full of galaxies, comets, planets, and stars, which made up many of those little dots of light, other beacons of light in the endless dark, similar to our own sun. The question of where these stars came from is one that scientists obviously had much interest in, and one that is today rather well understood. There are several ways to go about answering the question of “what makes stars shine,” and I intend to pursue a number of these ways.
Hydrogen is by far the most abundant element in our universe, and so it should come as no surprise that stars, by and large, are composed of hydrogen gas. This abundance of hydrogen (and helium, for that matter) in our universe is the result of a very
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The process of fusion is what causes stars to emit such massive amounts of energy, providing levels of energy higher than chemical and gravitational processes. The most common example of fusion, and the one that is most relevant for the discussion of stars, is when hydrogen atoms fuse to form helium. For atoms which have below a certain number of protons and neutrons, specifically iron, fusing two atoms together actually releases energy in the form of photons. In many stars, this process is through the proton-proton chain, but other forms of fusion also exist. Due to the dense mass of hot gas that stars consist of, atoms can acquire the necessary speeds to crash into each other and fuse, and for this reason, stars emit light. This light emitted is from all over the spectrum, but in many cases, we see stars who peak in visible light, like our own