Stellar Structure and Evolution (SSE | SPA7023P)

This course has its own web page.

Year: 1 | Semester: A | Level: 7 | Credits: 0

Course organiser: Dr Sergei Vorontsov | Course deputy: Prof David Burgess

Synopsis:

Stars are important constituents of the universe. This course starts from well known physical phenomena such as gravity, mass conservation, pressure balance, radiative transfer of energy and energy generation from the conversion of hydrogen to helium. From these, it deduces stellar properties that can be observed (that is, luminosity and effective temperature or their equivalents such as magnitude and colour) and compares the theoretical with the actual. In general good agreement is obtained but with a few discrepancies so that for a few classes of stars, other physical effects such as convection, gravitational energy generation and degeneracy pressure have to be included. This allows an understanding of pre-main sequence and dwarf stages of evolution of stars, as well as the helium flash and supernova stages.