Episode 8.notebook April 29, 2014 Episode 8: Sisters of the Sun Pleiades: Small cluster of stars visible to the naked eye. These stars are just starting to leave their nursery. The Pleiades were seen as 7 sisters in both Greek & Native American cultures. They were also used as a vision test. The more stars you could make out, the better your vision, and more likely you are to be a hunter/warrior. Pickering's Calculators: a group of women that analyzed and classified stars by their spectra. (From Harvard) Annie Jump Cannon: credited with creation of the Harvard Classification System of Stars. This system separates stars into 7 classes, each with 10 sub-classes. OBAFGKM These are the seven classes. They are easy to remember with the saying, "Oh, Be A Fine Girl. Kiss Me." Quite by accident, we found out that the classifications actually relate to the temperature of the stars.Episode 8.notebook April 29, 2014 Henrietta Swan Leavitt: another calculator, or computer, from Harvard, that helped determine a way to measure the distance to stars and galaxies. Cecilia Payne: She realized, and then doubted herself, that the stars are made MOSTLY of Hydrogen. This flew in the face of conventional wisdom, and she tried to retract her statement with doubt. Four years later, a man looked over the math and proved her right. This man was Henry Russell, who gets his name on the fancy Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram.Episode 8.notebook April 29, 2014 Hertzsprung-Russel (HR) Diagram: A Diagram that compares temp & luminosity (absolute brightness). There is a pattern to the relationship, giving us 4 chunks. 1) Main Sequence, diagonal line in the middle. 2) White Dwarfs (at the bottom). These are small, hot stars. 3) Giants, just off main sequence. Bigger, but cooler stars. 4) Super Giants, very hot to cool, but are super big, so they put off a ton of light.Episode 8.notebook April 29, 2014 The Fates of the Stars. Stars like our sun, will escape the main sequence and become a giant star. Then, the heat and energy of fusion will die off (we run out of Hydrogen) and the star will collapse again. This collapse is halted by the repulsion of electrons, and the star becomes a White-Dwarf. Stars like Rigel, 15 or so times as massive as our Sun, have a different fate. Their gravity is even stronger, and the collapse from gravity will pull the star in closer and denser. Gravity will overcome the electron repulsion and the Neutrons of each atom will almost touch. In a sense, this star almost becomes one giant atomic nucleus. These are called Neutron Stars, some of them become Pulsars, spewing out high energy light while they spin. The process of collapse also releases a lot of matter and light, and we call this a Supernova. The final option for stars, those that are 30x or more massive than our sun is becoming a Black Hole. These stars have a gravity so great that it can overcome even the repulsion forces inside the nucleus of an atom, and become almost infinitely dense. They warp time & space so much that not even light can escape their Event Horizon.