Posted 01 May 2008 - 02:44 PM
Right, I guess I am a thread killer. ::will leave this thread alone so it can thrive.:: ;(
The answer, though, is by small stars. Since our star is attempting to maintain Hydrostatic Equilibrium, if the temperature goes up, it expands a bit, thus cooling it off. And if it collapses, the heats up, making it expand. This works for it's main cycle life time, but when it gets old and used up most of it's fuel, it can't do this so well. The inner portion get denser so it can burn other materials, thus increasing the heat and causing the outer layers of the star to puff out. This is the Giant Phase of a star. Eventually for low mass stars, it just loses it's oomph, and the center slowly stops burning things at all, and the "wind" from that core continues to push away the outer layers. So you are left with a white dwarf in the middle of a Planetary nebula, which is the gas that used to be the outer layers of the star.
#: ssh God@Heaven.org
Password: CurvedSpace
/God> rm *
The BEST error message ever: "Cowardly refusing to create an empty archive."