Several billion years after a star’s birth its life will eventually end. How a star will die is determined by its mass, age, and type. The sun and other stars shine as results of reactions in its core. This changes light elements to become heavier and release energy in the process, which creates the necessary pressure needed to keep stars from collapsing in on themselves. When a star’s core lacks hydrogen fuel it stops its flow of energy, therefore, disabling the star to function.
Average stars 1.4 km’s larger or the same as our sun live around 10 billion years. When these stars start to die it shrinks, heats and becomes denser due to the weight of gravity. This new density and temperature allow the production of helium to form carbon. This fusion then generates excessive amounts of energy that heat and expand its outer layers causing it to bloat into a red giant, these can swell up to 100 million to 1 billion km’s in diameter. When the helium runs out, the core will expand and cool. When it cools, it will dispense materials that collect around the dying star that form a planetary nebula. As the core cools it becomes a white dwarf star and eventually, radiates away its heat and turns into a black dwarf. This process takes up billions of years.
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When stars smaller than our sun die, they also become dense and heated due to the fusion of helium and carbon, but because of their size swell into red dwarfs. Size allows it to heat at a lower temperature, allowing red dwarfs to live for billions of years as its temperature restricts it from burning through its supply of hydrogen quickly. This can stretch the lifespan of red dwarfs to trillions of years. Eventually, when a red dwarf burns through its hydrogen, it will become a white dwarf and then a black dwarf.
Stars larger than our sun tend to live the shortest lifespan, 10 million years. When stars of this size exhaust their fuel, they too, fuse helium into carbon. However, when the supply of helium is gone, its mass is enough to fuse carbon into heavier elements including, neon, silicon, oxygen, sulfur, magnesium, and iron. Once the core has turned to iron it is unable to burn. The star then collapses by gravity and the iron core starts to heat. The core then becomes so tightly packed that its protons and electrons combine to form neutrons. In less than a second, the core will shrink to the size of a neutron star. Its outer layers then fall inward on the core which heats to billion of degrees, then explodes. This is called a supernova and will outshine all the stars in the galaxy before fading into neutron stars or if big enough a black hole. It releases energy and materials created inside its core into space where its stardust is used to form stars and planets.
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