▲ Professor Byun Yong-Ik (Astronomy, Yonsei University), giving an explanation of the life a star. Photographed by Suh Jaehee.

The recently attention-grabbing White Dwarf that is 450 light years away has excited numerous astronomers because it was, according to NASA, the first observable case in which a celestial body consumes (not literally) a body of a far lesser weight—a planet in this case. The scientific communities are enraptured to verify their theories on stars and witness what is probably a once-in-a-blue-moon event. Moreover, it is now only a matter of time before the scientific community peels back all the layers of this scientific phenomena.  

 

The birth and death of a star is one of the most interesting topics to astronomers, as they have been able to observe every step of the process in the sky with a little help from a telescope. In addition, stars have always been constant, meaning they are born and destroyed in the same process that has transpired in countless places in the universe for billions of years.

 

According to Professor Byun Yong-Ik (Astronomy, Yonsei University), however, humans have only started to gain a deep understanding of the stars after the creation of the field of modern astronomy. “Our ancestors were aware that stars and planets changed colors, but they were not aware of the reasons behind such phenomenon.”

 

Byun also gave some examples of the misconceptions people had in the past. “One of them was that all stars shared a common life. This was not too askew, but the belief that all stars had the same distance between each other was highly inaccurate.” He went on by mentioning some beliefs that were not too off, such as that the fainter the stars, the farther away they are from the observer. 

 

Another feature of stars is their mass, which almost solely determines their lifespan. Byun stated that any stars considered to be heavy, possessing a mass tenfold or bigger than that of the sun, will only live a very short life of several million years, whereas others considered to be light, possessing only one fifth or less the mass of the sun, will live a very long life of several billion years, a time period comparable to the age of the universe.

 

Regardless of their mass, heavy or light, all stars illuminate by themselves, and they do so by nuclear fusion, which is a nuclear reaction that exhausts the fuel called, Hydrogen. In laymen’s terms, a nuclear reaction is where two Hydrogen atoms combine to form helium, and a great amount of energy is emitted through heat and light. This explains just for what specific reason the Sun is bright and hot. “The bigger pressure and temperature a star has,” Byun explained, “the more active the nuclear reaction will be.”

 

The reactions happen almost instantly and only recently, that is 1942, when the first artificial nuclear reactor “Chicago Pile-1” opened, have humans finally been reproducing nuclear fusion on their home planet. Despite all this, the incessant cycle of birth and death of the stars that constantly undergo such nuclear reaction has been going on for eonssomewhat of an understatement, technically. 

 

“The ones with the bigger mass, the so-called heavy ones, explode with a big boom, a state which we astronomers call, ‘supernova.’” Most of the masses disperse into the endless abyss of space, pieces of which become the origin of Earth, living organisms, and just about anything else that inhabits the planet. “That is why the stars have a really intimate relationship with us,” expressed Byun. Indeed, humans have a distant yet very close relationship with the stars.

 

The discussion of the birth and death of stars inevitably leads to the discussion of the Big Bang Theory, which is exactly what he moved onto after his brief overview of the stars’ lives. “All the masses were stuck at a single point, so they witnessed an unimaginably drastic increase of pressure and temperature. The universe then expanded, cooled down, and formed nuclei.” He added that because of the substantial change in such a short time, the universe had no time to fuse its early atoms together. Along with the situation of the universe, Byun also listed some of the examples of newly created atoms during the big explosion, which are the following: Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium. “On another note, the Sun had a relatively small mass, so it was not capable of creating such heavy atoms as Magnesium or Sodium.”

 

A comprehensive explanation of the steps of the life a star will help with the grasp of the aforementioned concepts, which Byun kindly offered to give. The first step of the never-ending cycle is protostars, and they grow to become either a star like the Sun with a lifespan of several billion years or a massive star with a lifespan of merely several million years. 

 

“The Sun is currently only five billion years old, and it will start expanding at the very last stage into a red giant,” Byun went on. “At that point, inside the core of the star, Helium will fuse with other Helium to create such atoms as Carbon and Silicon.” He added that after the star’s inflation, the entity will turn into a white dwarf, the result after the red giant has spread most of its mass onto space.

 

The recent white dwarf, which has been observed through the Kepler telescope, consumed its surrounding planet in a way because the gravitational energy of the white dwarf destroyed the planet. “Usually,” Byun explains, “when a planet revolves around a star, the star will periodically become fainter and brighter. But, instead, this particular white dwarf does not become brighter right after its eclipse by the planet.” From this, Byun says that astronomers can tell that the planet is disintegrating and the two entities are only 80 kilometers away.

 

The consumption of the planet by the star is not too unfamiliar to Byun, as he gave a similar example of the phenomenon: the ebb and flood tides. It is the same occurrence except the recent one with the white dwarf is much bigger and extreme in scale. “If there is one catch, it is that all the pictures on the web of the phenomenon are merely impressions,” added Byun. “We do not know if such destruction ever happened, and multiple alternative theories exist that could explain the incident.”

 

Such a pioneering discovery was made possible by the vision held by some, in this case, the United States (U.S.). Scientific research, according to Byun, is all about discovering something no one knew about and trying things no one ever tried. “Korea is too focused on projects that give quick results. This is why the nation has become near-sighted.” He further added that science cannot be converted to money and more importantly, the leaders of the nation need a vision that favors long-term investments, which will allow for science to flourish in a nation. And perhaps, Byun is right. South Korea will, one day, break with its traditional methods and start investing in the stocks that bear their fruits gradually over time.

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