The night sky is full of stars, and our own Sun is the nearest star to us. Stars seem to last forever, the patterns they make in the sky don’t seem to change, and the Sun seems to have been there for an extraordinary length of time. They don’t last forever; they have a life cycle, they form from a cloud of interstellar gas, and eventually run out of fuel. The more mass a star has, the shorter its life span.
The simulation below uses a highly simplified astrophysical model of a star’s life cycle to illustrate how stars of different masses evolve. The top slider is used to select the mass of a star relative to the mass of the Sun, and the second slider is used to advance through the life span.
