smarTenz

One day, the universe has to come to an end, and the last star will stop shining and die. It will probably be a red dwarf. Unlike the other celestial bodies that have clear classification standards, red dwarfs fall into a variety of luminosities, masses and fusion activities, making them really interesting to study. They are also considered our best bets to find life forms outside of our solar system. The term “red dwarf” was first coined in 1915, but doesn’t actually hold a clear meaning, astronomically speaking.  The appellation was set only to distinguish them from their cousins, the blue dwarfs. So what do we know about red dwarfs, and what makes them our last hope for survival? 1.     Red dwarfs are little stars To fully understand why red dwarfs are classified as stars, we first need to comprehend what makes any other star a star. With so many bodies out there in the universe, astronomers struggled to trace down a separating line between what could p...

Life forms can survive as long as there is an energy source, take it away and everything will die. Although humans discovered numerous ways to spring out energy and thus life, no mean can ever equal the most ancient, the most powerful and yet the most lasting source of energy ever, Hydrogen fusion. Since the beginning of time, all kinds of stars have been fusing Hydrogen into Helium releasing enormous amounts of thermal and light energies feeding up the entire universe. Unfortunately, the universe will die. It will happen very slowly, over billions of years, but it will happen. At universal time scale, our sun will die in no time at all, and so will do all the stars of all the galaxies in more or less time. Luckily, there will be places that will exist nearly forever, and could be considered humanity last home: the corpses of dead stars; white dwarfs. What are these strange and mysterious things? And why are they our last hope for survival? 1.     Once upon a t...