How Long Do Stars Live?
How long a star will live depends on how big it is. Stars range is size from about 1/10 the mass of the Sun (0.1 solar masses) up to about 100 solar masses. The bigger the star, the shorter its life expectancy. This may seem strange at first because a bigger star would have more nuclear fuel than a small star. So, one would expect the big stars to burn longer. To explain this point I like to draw a comparison with Boy Scouts out on a camping trip. Let’s say that I take my troop out on a camping trip. We get our tents, etc., set up and then I tell them to go out into the woods and collect fire wood. They scatter and collect a huge pile of wood. Meanwhile, I go out myself and collect a much more modest pile. Now, boys being boys, they throw all of their wood into a single bon fire and light it all up at once. After about an hour, their bonfire has burned down to coals. At the same time I build a much smaller fire and keep feeding more wood into as needed. In this way, I can make my more
Stars live different lengths of time, depending on how big they are. A star like our sun lives for about 10 billion years, while a star which weighs 20 times as much lives only 10 million years, about a thousandth as long. Stars begin their lives as dense clouds of gas and dust. After a star forms, it burns hydrogen into helium, and once hydrogen begins to run out, further stages of burning occur, such as the burning of helium into heavier elements. If the star is less massive than several times the mass of the sun, it will eventually become a white dwarf. If it is even more massive it will first implode and then explode in a supernova explosion.
There’s no way to say how long the “average” star lives, because there’s really no such thing as an “average” star. Some stars are so small that their diameter is only 1/70,000 the diameter of the sun, while others have a diameter a thousand times larger than the sun’s. Stars “die” in different ways too. Some stars get smaller a
