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Asked by Kaibi to Hannah, Joanna, Joe, Luis, Vincent on 17 Jun 2016.
Question: How long does a star live?
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Luis Perez Calderon answered on 17 Jun 2016:
It depends on many factors, but a very important one is the mass of the star. On average they live about 10 billion years.
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Hannah Grist answered on 17 Jun 2016:
What a lovely question 🙂
It really depends on the star. Stars are all really massive balls of gas that burn, which is why they look so bright to us. Oddly, the smaller the star is, the longer it lives, because really big stars burn really hot and brightly, and use up all their gas much quicker than the smaller ones.
A star like our Sun is expected to burn for about 10 BILLION years, and that’s pretty average! A much smaller star might burn for a TRILLION years (that’s 1,000,000,000,000 years!). That also longer then the Universe has currently been around.
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Joanna Bagniewska answered on 20 Jun 2016:
Usually until about 27, if they’re a rock star! [sorry]
In all seriousness, about 10-13 billion years. -
Vincent Keenan answered on 21 Jun 2016:
This is a good question! All stars lie on a spectrum called Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. This plots the stars brightness against it’s mass, the more massive it is, the more fuel it has to burn. The brighter the star, the more intense the energy released. Some of the cooler stars can burn for a lot longer than the bright ones because they are not burning the fuel as intensely. This relationship must maintained, otherwise the star would collapse!
Most stars lie on what is called the “main sequence”, like the Sun, and the average lifetime for these stars is close around 12 billion years.
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Joe Nunez-Mino answered on 21 Jun 2016:
It depends I think. A bit like living things, there can be an average life span but many things can influence what happens in the end
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