This article discusses the groundbreaking work of Cecilia Payne, who in 1925 proposed that stars were primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. It also features an image of a dying star, NGC 2440, illustrating the process of stellar evolution.
In 1925, grad student Cecilia Payne first proposed that stars were mostly made of hydrogen and helium, shaping our understanding of the universe. This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the colorful death of a star similar to our sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star's remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star makes the material glow.
The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, is the white dot in the center. Our sun will eventually burn out and shroud itself with stellar debris, but not for another 5 billion years. The planetary nebula in this image is called NGC 2440. The white dwarf at the center of NGC 2440 is one of the hottest known, with a surface temperature of more than 360,000 degrees Fahrenheit (200,000 degrees Celsius). NGC 2440 lies about 4,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Puppis. The material expelled by the star glows with different colors depending on its composition, its density and how close it is to the hot central star. Blue samples helium; blue-green oxygen, and red nitrogen and hydrogen.Humans have observed the stars for millennia, ever since our ancestors looked toward the sky. Throughout our history, the sparkling patterns of light upon the inky black sky have acted as compasses and calendars, told stories ofchanged dramatically in 1925, when a young graduate student figured out what the twinkly lights were made of—and laid the foundation of stellar astrophysics. This intuitive and brilliant astronomer was Cecilia Payne, and at 24 years old, she showed that stars were not like our Earth, but instead were glowing spheres of mostly fiery hydrogen and helium, the two lightest and simplest elements in the universe.But like many hypotheses or discoveries that counter the leading theories of the time, Payne’s thesis was questioned and argue
Astronomy Stars Hydrogen Helium Stellar Evolution Cecilia Payne
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