2015 August 03
originally posted on facebook

I learned recently that pre-main sequence stars (those fueled by their own gravitational collapse) are typically much brighter, by up to an order of magnitude, than their successor main sequence stars:

Wikipedia

The reason for this is that the young star has comparable surface temperature to a mature star while being physically much larger, so gives off more light. In fact, for fully convective stars the surface temperature is almost solely a function of the mass of the star and largely independent of its radius:

Wikipedia

Unrelated:

Wikipedia

YouTube

Follow RSS/Atom feed for updates.