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Stellar Evolution
Variable stars highlight an important fact about the heavens above us: the universe is always changing. The
universe is very large, stars and galaxies are very far away, and many changes occur on timescales far longer
than we can see. Most things in the sky -- stars, nebulae, and galaxies -- don't appear to change at all during
the course of a human lifetime. But variable stars do change on timescales that we can observe. We have
now discovered stars that vary on timescales from milliseconds to centuries. Each one can tell us something
about itself through its variability, and information that variable stars have provided has given us a better
understanding of the larger picture.

One of the key concepts in astronomy is that stars change over time -- they're born from clouds of interstellar
gas and dust, they shine by their own light created through nuclear fusion of hydrogen in their cores, and
eventually they run out of fuel and die, returning some of their mass back to interstellar space. Their remains
can then be taken up into new generations of stars, starting the process over again. The process of change
that a star undergoes during its lifetime is called stellar evolution. But this process can take millions or billions
of years for a star, much longer than we can hope to observe directly. Since we can't observe stellar evolution
over long timescales, how do we know it occurs?

(/sites/default/files/images/The_life_of_Sun-like_stars_sm.jpg)There are many

pieces of evidence that point toward our current understanding of stellar evolution.
One was the understanding of the nuclear physics responsible for why stars
shine, and the subsequent realization that stars have a large but finite source of
fuel to create heat. Another piece of evidence was the observational study of star
clusters -- groups of stars all born at the same time and place -- and the eventual
realization that the properties of star clusters differ depending upon how old they
are. Evidence about the physical properties of stars has also come from the study
of variable stars. In fact, variable stars often provide the best means of studying
the physical properties of individual stars -- their variations turn them into "experimental laboratories" for stellar
physics, and have given us many important clues as to what stars are and why they behave the way that they
do.

Every time someone observes a variable star, they're collecting evidence of how the star is behaving. We can
build hypotheses of why stars vary, and we can then test these hypotheses with all of the data that has been
collected. Each piece of evidence provides a different test, and each test allows us to refine our hypotheses,
and make a more accurate description of why stars vary. If we can learn enough about individual stars, we can
then begin to learn about classes of variable stars. Eventually we can learn about all stars, variable or not, by
putting together all of our models and descriptions of different kinds of stars, and then building a better
understanding of what stars are and how they evolve in general.

So what do we know about stellar evolution, and how have variable stars contributed to that? Let's explore!

Jump to: Preliminaries: The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram

Jump to: Star Birth
Jump to: The Main Sequence
Jump to: Leaving The Main Sequence
Jump to: Old Age
Jump to: Binary Stars
Jump to: Star Death

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The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram

When we classify stars, we try to use quantitative measurements of their properties, so that we can better
understand how stars differ from one another, and why those differences occur. There are a number of
physical characteristics of stars that provide important information on the lives of stars. Two quantities, mass
and age, are probably most fundamental. The progress of a star's life is predestined by its mass, because
ultimately the mass determines how much energy the star can produce and how quickly it will do so. The age
of a star tells you how far along it is in its evolution. However, both of these quantities are hard to measure
directly. You can sometimes measure the mass if the star is in a binary system, using the straightforward
physics of Newton's laws of motion. But there's no scale that you can rest a star on and measure its mass.
Likewise you can't tell a star's age directly just by looking at it. Again, you need some roundabout way of
finding this out. Two other parameters are a star's luminosity and temperature, and both of these are related
to mass and age in a way that we now understand, but like mass and age, deriving these physical parameters
requires some extra work to derive. What would be ideal is to find a way to classify stars based upon a simple
observation.

Two astronomers of the early 20th Century, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell, discovered an
important observational means of comparing different stars with one another. They found that when you plot
the brightnesses of individual stars versus their spectral type or color on a graph, the stars lie within well-
defined areas within the graph. A star of a given brightness could only lie within a certain range of colors, and a
star with a given color could only lie within a certain range of brightnesses. More observational and theoretical
research showed that the color-magnitude diagram or Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was a snapshot of the
evolutionary states of the stars plotted within the diagram. Stars would be found in different parts of the
diagram depending upon their masses and their ages. Furthermore, as a star gets older, it changes in
brightness and color in a very predictable way, and that stars of different masses change in very different ways.

Why is this concept important for variable stars? Individual stars have different physical properties and lie at
different positions within the H-R diagram, and if a star happens to be variable, the physical information we can
gain about the star by studying its variability can tell us about what stars at that position in the H-R diagram are
like in general. And because there are different classes of variable stars found throughout the H-R diagram,
we've learned a lot about stellar evolution by studying variable stars, even though it may take millions or billions
of years for a given star to evolve.

When we talk about stars, we often refer to them based upon their position in the H-R diagram. For example,
we call stars that are still burning hydrogen in their cores main sequence stars, and will often refer to stars
younger and older than main sequence stars as pre- and post-main sequence stars. Stars that have evolved
well beyond the main sequence are often on the red giant branch of the H-R diagram, or might be
asymptotic giant branch stars. We might talk about RR Lyrae variables being on the horizontal branch, or
beta Cephei stars being on the upper main sequence. All of these are stages of stars' lives, and the
classifications help us to put them in context within the broader picture of stellar evolution. In the following
sections, we will mention some of these stages of evolution and explain what studying variable stars can tell us
about them.

Star Birth
When you look up at the night sky in the early months of the year, you can see two great constellations high in
the sky: Taurus and Orion. These constellations are home to what we now know are star forming regions --
concentrations of gas and dust within our Galaxy, collapsing under their own gravity to form new stars. Every
star that you see in the sky was once formed inside a star forming region, millions or billions of years ago.
These regions in Orion and Taurus are home to some of the youngest stars we can see in the sky, and they're
home to some important variable stars as well -- variables that have helped tell the story of how stars are born.
You may be very familiar with one of these already: the Great Nebula in Orion, known as the Orion Nebula or
Messier 42 (M 42). The Orion Nebula is home to an enormous number of young stars, and it is the light of the
most massive of these stars that causes the nebula itself to glow.
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Young variable stars were first called Orion variables or nebular variables, recognizing the fact that they occur
in large numbers within the Orion or other similar gaseous nebulae. These are general names for a broad
class of stars known as pre-main sequence or PMS stars. The most famous class of these nebular variables
are the T Tauri stars, named for the prototype, T Tauri. These stars appear to be similar to "normal" stars
except for a few important differences: they're highly variable, they're less bright than we would expect a star of
their size and color to be, they often lie near gaseous nebulae, and they show emission lines -- the light emitted
by highly excited atoms of a thin gas. The T Tauri stars were recognized as a distinct group in the 1940s, but it
wasn't until the early 1960s that the T Tauri stars were finally understood to be newborn stars, still weakly
accreting dust and gas from the nebulae from which they formed. Their variability can be caused by a number
of things but much of it is related to accretion. When any mass falls within a gravitational field, some of its
gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. If you hold a ball at eye level and drop it, it will
accelerate toward the ground, gaining a kinetic energy equal to the amount of potential energy it lost falling
from eye level to the ground. The same thing happens to gas and dust accreting onto a protostar: the gas is
falling down the gravitational potential well of the star and accelerating. In this case, the gas gains some
kinetic energy but also heats up. The infalling gas has some viscosity (or friction) and as it falls toward the
protostar, viscosity within the gas causes it to heat up. As it gets hotter, it gives off more and more light until it
impacts the surface, where it gives off even more light.

(/sites/default/files/images/protoplanetary_disk.jpg)Some young variables are

extreme in their variability. Two variables in the Orion constellation give variable
star classes their names: the FU Orionis stars (or FUORs) and UX Orionis stars
(UXORs), both closely related in age but different in variability. The FUORs are
believed to undergo very large and very long-term brightness variations,
sometimes brightening by more than a factor of 100, and then fading again over a
course of years or decades. The origins of these outbursts is believed to be rapid
accretion of circumstellar material onto the young protostar for a period of a few
years. All protostars are now or have recently finished accreting material around
them, but FUORs seem to be (temporarily at least) doing it at a more rapid rate. This rapid accretion results in
a larger release of energy as light and heat.

The UXORs are almost the opposite. UXORs are stars that vary on very short timescales, getting dimmer
rather than brighter. UXORs are believed to be stars with circumstellar disks (as all protostars are at one point)
where the disk is clumpy rather than uniform. Some of these clumps are large enough to partially obscure the
protostar as they orbit around it, causing the star to dim before our eyes. Essentially, the clumps eclipse their
parent star relative to our line of sight.

How do we know all of this? When T Tauri, and FU and UX Ori were discovered, we didn't know they were
protostars still in the process of forming. We learned this gradually over time, by making observations, and
testing various theories of why they look the way they do. The very first observation astronomers made was
simply that "they're variable". That in itself is interesting since most stars are not obviously variable.
Astronomers began tracking their brightness over time. Then they discovered other stars whose behavior was
similar. The realization that such stars often reside in or near gaseous nebulae, and that nebulae were places
where stars were being born eventually led us to conclude that these stars are young, still in the process of
forming. More observations in optical light and at other wavelengths showed that their variability originates
from some of the same processes by which they form. Stars can brighten when matter accretes onto the star,
or when changes occur in the disk of material surrounding them. They can fade as clouds of dust form around
the star, or when these clouds orbit around and temporarily obscure them.

We now have a good understanding of how stars form (from collapsing clouds of gas and dust) and how long it
takes (a few million years). We know that the process is gradual, and that it continues for a little while even
after the protostar begins to shine like star. And we know this accretion process itself leads to variability. New
observations still lead to refinements in our understanding, and we continue to study young stars today. These

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observations extend across the electromagnetic spectrum too, and we observe them with radio telescopes,
infrared observatories in space, and even X-ray telescopes in space. Since all stars go through this formation
process, the more we know about it the more we can understand the subsequent stages of stellar evolution.

The Main Sequence

Once a young protostar has accreted all of the gas and dust that it can from the cloud from which it was born, it
may be massive enough to burn hydrogen in its core and shine as a star. If and when this happens, it
becomes a zero-age main sequence star. The main sequence is defined as the part of a star's lifetime spent
burning hydrogen at its core; the start of its main-sequence lifetime is the point at which hydrogen burning first
begins, and the end is defined by the point at which it runs out of hydrogen in its core. The amount of time
spent on the main sequence can vary from star to star too; the main sequence lifetime is mainly a function of a
star's mass. Our Sun will spend between 9 and 10 billion years on the main sequence; a much lower mass
star might spend 100 billion years on the main sequence, while a much higher mass star might only spend a
few million years.

Stars on the main sequence change very little over this span of their lives, although lots of important changes
are happening. The core is slowly converting hydrogen atoms to helium atoms and releasing energy in the
process. The changes in composition introduce subtle changes in the structure over time, which also change
the temperature of the star and the amount of light it gives off (its "luminosity"). But we have two big problems
trying to study and understand these changes: they can take millions or billions of years to become apparent,
and they happen deep inside the star where we can't actually see them take place! We understand some of
the basic things about stars just by applying the laws of physics as we knew them, and inferring what the inside
of the star must be like to explain everything we see on the outside. For example, once physicists in the early
20th century understood that atoms could fuse together to make other atoms and release energy in the
process, that knowledge was then applied to stars to explain why they shine and for how long they live.

But there are lots of complex things happening inside stars, and we could learn a lot about them if only we
could somehow go inside them and "look around" a little. As it turns out, we can do that, and we do it in exactly
the same way that geologists can study the deep interior of the Earth -- by recording its vibrations. We study
the conditions deep inside the Earth by watching how sound waves -- especially those created by earthquakes
-- propagate around the Earth. If we measure the slight vibrations at the surface of the Earth, we can make a
very good measurement of the conditions deep inside the Earth. This is because the sound waves generated
at one place on the earth have to travel through the interior to reach other locations. The study of the interior of
the Earth using its vibrations is called seismology.

We do something very similar to study the interiors of stars, and we call this asteroseismology. In stars, sound
and gravity waves can propagate through the interior in a similar way that the vibrations of an earthquake travel
through the Earth. For some stars, we can measure these vibrations by seeing how the brightness of different
parts of the star's surface change over time. The vibrations of the star's surface are called pulsations, and we
can measure the properties of these pulsations to say something about the conditions inside the star. In many
stars -- including our own Sun -- there are many different vibrations happening at the same time; each vibration
frequency is called a pulsation mode. (You can think of a "mode" like a note on a piano keyboard. Different
notes are different modes.) If we can combine information about each of these different modes into a single
model that can explain them all, then this model can tell us a great deal about the inside of the star.

The Sun is perhaps the most important pulsating variable there is, and the study of its pulsations is called
helioseismology. The Sun's pulsations are too faint to be seen with the naked eye, but careful study has
revealed that there are thousands of pulsation modes present inside the Sun at any given time. Because there
are so many modes visible in the Sun, helioseismologists have to fine-tune their models very, very precisely in
order to make models match the observed pulsations. Because of that we know to great precision many
important things about the inside of the Sun, including: the temperature and density at its center and the way
that temperature and density decrease from the center to the surface; the composition of the interior of the
Sun, both in its core where hydrogen is being converted to helium, and farther outside the core; and finer
details about its structure, such as whether it rotates at a different rate deep inside than it does at the surface.
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Much of what we know about the lives of stars has come directly from the study of the variability of the Sun.
But it can't tell us everything about all stars because it's just one star, with one mass and one age. If we want
to learn about other stars in this way, we have to look for pulsations in other stars. We can do just that for a
number of other pulsating stars. One classic example of this is the study of delta Scuti stars. These are stars
that can have dozens (rather than thousands) of pulsation modes, but where the modes have large light
amplitudes that are easier to detect. Delta Scuti stars on the main sequence are about 1.5 to 3 times as
massive as the Sun; we can build models of these stars just as we do for the Sun, and so we can also try to
"look inside" these stars as well. In recent years, we've also started to do precise photometry of other "solar-
like" stars in hopes of learning more about stars similar to the Sun, but at different stages of their lives. Using
small telescopes in space (like WIRE, MOST, and COROT) we can try to detect solar-like oscillations in these
other stars, and compare them to what we detect in the Sun. Each star having a different mass, different age,
and different chemical composition helps to refine and improve our picture of the structure and evolution of
stars.

There's another type of variability that can occur in main-sequence stars, one that we also see on our Sun. If
you've ever looked at a picture of the Sun, or looked at it through a solar filter, you might have noticed a
number of dark spots on its surface. These spots -- sunspots -- are caused by strong magnetic fields on the
Sun that interfere with heat transfer from the Sun's interior to the surface. Magnetic fields can block the
movement of gas ("convection") which means that energy inside the Sun can't get out as easily. When this
happens, the patch of the Sun's surface above where the gas motion is blocked begins to cool down, and thus
appears darker to our eyes -- we see a sunspot.

We now know that this process can happen on any star we see, and on some stars -- particularly very young
stars -- the appearance and disappearance of "starspots" results in a large change in brightness. These
changes can even be periodic if the star is rotating and the spot survives for several rotation periods of the
star. We can see variability due to star spots in RS Canum Venaticorum (or RS CVn) and BY Draconis
stars. There's an associated kind of variability that we also see in the Sun: flares. On the Sun, flares are also
associated with magnetic fields around sunspots, and are caused by these magnetic fields acting like giant
particle accelerators, squeezing the gas in the solar atmosphere and accelerating it to great speed. We see
these flares as bright flashes near the surface of the Sun lasting a few minutes. Similar flares probably happen
on all stars with magnetic fields but one class of star -- the UV Ceti variables -- have very strong magnetic
fields. Their strong magnetic fields, combined with the fact that their surfaces are cooler and dimmer than the
Sun, mean that their flares are large and easily measurable. The study of magnetic activity in stars has been
an important topic in stellar astrophysics. Our understanding of it is very incomplete, even for our own Sun.
We know, for example, that the Sun has a 22-year cycle -- the Solar Cycle -- where sunspot activity waxes and
wanes, changing magnetic polarity once per 11 years. But we don't fully understand why this is so. The more
we observe this kind of variability in the Sun and other stars, the more we'll know and the better our
understanding may become.

Leaving the Main Sequence

The end of the main sequence is defined as the point at which all of the hydrogen in a star's core has been
converted into helium, and the nuclear reactions in the core of the star temporarily cease. Since these nuclear
reactions provide the heat and pressure that hold up the outer layers of the star against the force of gravity, the
star must readjust itself to compensate. The processes that occur during this readjustment cause a number of
complex physical changes both inside and outside the star, and the star will change dramatically in appearance
during this time. The most notable change is that the star will become a red giant, expanding in diameter,
increasing in luminosity, and cooling in temperature. These changes take millions of years, so they're not
obvious to our eyes. But as stars undergo these changes they may become true variable stars, or if they are
currently variable, that variability may change or even cease altogether. So what are some types of variable
star of the post main-sequence?

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There are parts of the H-R diagram where we find lots of variable stars. One of these is called the instability
strip, which runs from upper right (luminous and cool) to lower left (faint and hot) in the H-R diagram. When a
star lies within the instability strip, it may begin to pulsate. In all stars, certain layers within the star can become
more opaque to radiation if they become hotter or cooler. When this happens, energy from inside the star can
become trapped in that layer, increasing its temperature and pressure. If this layer is located at just the right
depth within a star, the layer can act like a piston that drives the outer layers of the star up and down in a
periodic fashion, making the star pulsate. We now know that only stars within the instability strip have this
layer at just the right depth. We also know based on stellar modeling that stars can lie within this strip at
certain parts of their lives depending upon how massive they are. Stars more than a few times the mass of the
Sun cross the instability strip after the main sequence. These are the Cepheid variables, named after the
class prototype delta Cephei. One of the very important things about Cepheids is that the time it takes them to
complete one pulsation cycle (the period) is proportional to the luminosity or absolute brightness of the star. If
we can measure the period of the star, then we know its luminosity. This is known as the period-luminosity or
P-L relation, and also by the name Leavitt Law, after its discoverer Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

Why is the P-L relation important? There is also a simple relation between the apparent brightness of a star, its
distance, and its absolute brightness. If we can measure the apparent brightness of a Cepheid, and then
determine its absolute brightness by measuring the period, we will then know the distance to the Cepheid. This
is incredibly useful because distances are very hard to measure beyond the solar neighborhood. We've used
Cepheid variables to measure distances to star clusters within the Milky Way, and even to measure the
distances to other Galaxies. The study of Cepheid variables is a major research effort within astronomy
because it provides us one of the best ways to calibrate our measurements of the size of the universe. Other
kinds of pulsating stars can be used the same way; both the delta Scuti and RR Lyrae stars pulsate for exactly
the same physical reason as the Cepheids, and both have their P-L relations. Delta Scuti stars can be used to
measure distances within the Milky Way, and RR Lyrae stars are useful for measuring distances to globular
clusters. Of the three, the Cepheids are the most luminous, and so we can see them at greater distances,
often in galaxies millions of light years away.

Many types of stars can pulsate, but not all are regular pulsators with a well-defined period, and most stars
outside the instability strip are not strong and regular pulsators. Some red giant stars are pulsating variables,
but don't have very strict periods, and don't have large amplitudes. In fact, you can hardly detect variability in
red giants at all with the eye, and you often need more sensitive equipment to measure their pulsations. Other
stars pulsate because they give off so much light that they're close to blowing themselves apart. The most
massive stars, those with more than 20-30 times the mass of our Sun, race through their supplies of nuclear
fuel so quickly that they'll only live for a few million years. Because they burn their nuclear fuel so quickly,
sometimes it has a difficult time escaping from the inside of the star, and this too can make a star "pulsate" in a
way. The massive S Doradus stars sometimes have enormous outbursts capable of blowing off their own
outer layers into space. The stars Eta Carinae in the southern hemisphere and P Cygni in the northern
hemisphere are examples of two of these. Both of these stars show evidence for low-amplitude pulsations,
and can occasionally undergo enormous eruptions, once every few centuries. It is likely that one day (perhaps
soon) that eta Carinae and P Cygni will both end their lives as the ultimate variable stars -- supernovae. (More
on those later!)

Old Age
All stars will eventually run out of fuel given enough time. The great majority of stars in the universe will pass
through a phase of their lives where they swell up to enormous size -- larger than the orbits of Earth and Mars -
- and become the most luminous stars in their neighborhood. These stars -- the asymptotic giant branch (or
AGB) stars -- can be considered the last stage of stellar evolution when a star is truly a "star", an object that
shines due to energy created by thermonuclear reactions deep inside. After a star has passed through the red
giant branch and landed on the red clump (Population I stars) or the horizontal branch (Population II), it has a
core made mostly of carbon or oxygen surrounded by layers of helium and hydrogen. These layers of helium
and hydrogen are themselves layered according to whether the material is undergoing nuclear fusion or not;

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burning helium slowly settles onto the carbon core, while burning hydrogen slowly settles onto the helium
shell. These burning shells are the main reason why AGB stars are so luminous; because the shell is closer to
the surface, the outer layers become much hotter and so the star puffs up to enormous size. But because the
star has such a large surface area, the amount of energy escaping from any one part of the surface is much
lower than for a main sequence star, and so is much, much cooler. That's why AGB stars are red -- most have
temperatures no more than 3000 to 3500 K.

What's most interesting is the short length of time stars spend on the AGB. A star may spend less than a
million years evolving from the end of the red giant branch to the end of the AGB. That is a long time on
human timescales, but very, very short in the life of a star! Further, some changes that occur on the AGB
happen not on million-year timescales, but over a few centuries or a few decades! AGB stars undergo
occasional events called thermal pulses, where the layer of helium surrounding the core suddenly undergoes
thermonuclear burning, causing large changes to the star's structure, its luminosity, and its temperature. These
events are called thermal pulses, and they're predicted to occur in all AGB stars by theoretical models of stellar
evolution. If they occur, they happen very fast compared to other timescales in stellar evolution, and it's
possible (though not proven) that we've seen some of these changes happen in a very few stars while we've
watched over the past few hundred years.

The AGB is the locus of one of the most famous and earliest-known classes of variable star, and one near and
dear to variable star observers: the Mira variables. Miras, named for the class prototype Mira (aka Mira Ceti,
omicron Ceti, or omi Cet) are giant, pulsating variable stars so large that it takes them a hundred days or more
to complete one pulsation cycle. They have large light amplitudes of at least 2.5 magnitudes, and some stars
vary by ten magnitudes -- a factor of 10,000 in brightness! And they're huge, sometimes larger than the orbit of
Mars.

Everything about the Mira variables is large, including and especially their importance in astrophysics. Like the
Cepheids and other pulsators, the Mira variables have a Period-Luminosity relationship, and so can be used as
distance indicators under some circumstances. Mira variables also have very high mass loss rates, and so
they are the origin of a large fraction of processed interstellar material in galaxies; most (if not all) of the matter
that makes up the world around us -- including ourselves -- came from inside an AGB star. And some Mira
variables have observational records longer than a century, some much, much longer; these long observational
records allow researchers to study evolutionary changes in Mira stars, one of the few instances where this is
possible. The period of a Mira is dependent upon its size, and so if the average diameter of the star expands
or contracts over time, its period will increase or decrease by a proportional amount. A very small number of
known Mira variables have shown large changes in period that suggest long-term changes are occurring inside
the star, and although it isn't proven that these changes are caused by thermal pulses, the possibility exists.
Mira itself was first discovered in the year 1596, and a few other Mira variables were discovered in the 17th
century. By the end of the 19th century, many more Mira variables were known, and today there are many
dozens of Mira variables with light curves spanning a century or more. Such light curves are an incredible
resource for stellar astrophysicists, and are one of the main reasons why organizations like the AAVSO
encourage observations of variable stars. It may be that an astrophysicist in the future may use your
observations of a Mira variable today to make an important discovery about the lives of AGB stars!

After the AGB, a star's lifetime is nearly over. The last stage of a star's life as a self-contained star may be the
RV Tauri stage, characterized by pulsations with periods between 30 and 150 days. Some RV Tauri stars are
known to have dust shells around them, and it's possible they've already passed through the AGB and Mira
phases and are headed toward becoming planetary nebulae and white dwarfs. Their pulsations aren't regular,
but instead seem to be weakly chaotic: while they may have cycles of maxima and minima that are fairly
regular, their lightcurves often don't repeat from one cycle to the next, and often get out of sync over many
cycles. While their behavior is sometimes similar to the Cepheid-like W Virginis stars, the RV Tauri stars seem
to have gone slightly "over the edge" -- they're so luminous relative to their masses that they can no longer
maintain regular pulsations. These stars are subdivided further into types "RVa" and "RVb", with the former
maintaining a nearly constant mean magnitude and the latter having long secondary periods on the order of

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1000 days or more where the star gets substantially fainter before returning to its former brightness. The
reasons why there are two types isn't yet proven, but it may be due to the lack or presence of circumstellar
material that periodically obscures the central star.

It's important to note one thing about the structure of stars at this point. Interiors of all stars become hotter and
denser as you go deeper and deeper inside, for the same reason that the pressure in the ocean gets larger and
larger the deeper you go. The weight of the mass above you increases the deeper you go in the star, until the
pressures become very, very great. When a star is on the main sequence, these pressures are high by human
standards, but atoms still behave like (mostly) normal matter, and the gas inside a star obeys physical rules --
called an equation of state -- similar to what we might observe here on earth. (The ideal gas law you might
have learned in chemistry of physical science classes is an example of an equation of state.) But as stars age
and more of the core is converted to heavier and heavier elements like helium, carbon, and oxygen, something
happens. The gas becomes so dense and the atoms so highly compressed that they stop acting like normal
matter -- the material becomes degenerate, meaning that the electronic fields of individual atoms can no longer
keep them separated as they normally do. When this happens, the behavior of the gas fundamentally
changes, and follows a degenerate equation of state. The gas no longer responds as quickly to heating by
expanding or increasing in pressure as an ideal gas might, and so one of the key things that allows a star to
keep its thermonuclear fires burning stops working.

A star whose core is in such a state is destined to die very, very soon in cosmic terms, and this core -- which is
very dense, very small, and very hot -- is called a white dwarf. If a star has a core in this state, it will very
soon begin blowing away material from its outer layers, until eventually the white dwarf core is exposed, and is
all that remains of the star that was. The process by which this happens is very spectacular for anyone who
happens to catch a star in the middle of this process. As the material flows away from the star into space, it
becomes more diffuse and nebular in nature, while remaining lit by the hot stellar remnant within, forming what
we see as a planetary nebula.

One of the key things that we learn from variable stars near the ends of their lives is how stars begin to return
some of their mass back to space around them, and it is this cast-off stellar material that will later compose the
clouds of gas and dust within galaxies that make up new generations of stars. Some of the material that is
shed by older stars will be recycled into new generations of stars, and so learning about the evolution of stars
also tells us how galaxies themselves evolve over time.

Binary Systems
Before we discuss the last stage of a star's life, let's take a moment to discuss another class of stars that can
span all stages of stellar evolution -- the binary stars. Many stars are members of binary or multiple systems,
and understanding how these systems form and evolve over time is an important part of stellar astronomy.
Binary stars are particularly interesting because they give us more opportunities to determine the physical
characteristics of these systems.

How? The light that stars give off contains a lot of information about them, and by applying all of the different
measurement tools that we have at our disposal, astronomers can learn a lot about stars. First, the stars are
moving relative to one another, and their motions cause their light to be doppler shifted back and forth in
wavelength every time the stars complete an orbit. Measurement of these shifts can tell us how fast the stars
are moving relative to their center of motion, and we can then make inferences about their masses and the
sizes of their orbits. Second, eclipses mean that one star periodically obscures the other. Since one star
obscures the other, we can try to map the shape and size of the stars based upon the eclipse light curves.
Individual stars within the system might be distorted in shape if the stars are close to one another in their
orbits. Stars also don't appear uniformly bright, but instead are dimmer toward their edges relative to our line
of sight. (You can see this in photographs of the Sun -- it looks brighter at the center than toward the edges.) If
you can measure this during eclipses, you can learn something about the temperature structure of the star's

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atmosphere. Third, when we follow binary stars over long periods of time, we may find that the orbital period
changes in ways that can only be caused by specific things, such as precession or the presence of a third body
in the system.

So assuming we can measure the properties of binary stars so that we know what they look like right now, what
does that mean for our understanding of stellar evolution? Pairs of widely separated stars can evolve normally,
as single stars do. However, if the stars are in close proximity to each other, or evolve to become closer to each
other, they may dramatically influence the other star, forever changing its evolutionary course. The most
dramatic way in which one star can influence the evolution of the other is through mass transfer. Each star has
its own gravitational field, and during most of a star's life, the majority of a star's mass will reside well within the
confines of its own gravitational well. But when two stars are close together, the shape of the gravitational field
gets complicated. If you envision the strength of a gravitational field around a star like a topographic map, then
there is a contour line separating the two stars, where the gravitational pull of each star balances out the other.
Any mass that rests on that equipotential surface -- called the Roche limit -- is pulled equally by the two stars; if
it crosses that line, then it will be pulled toward the other star. This is how mass transfer works. If a star grows
in size -- which stars do as they get older -- then it may grow to the point where it is larger than the Roche limit.
When it does, matter will start to spill over from one star and fall onto the other. When this happens, things can
get very interesting! This mass transfer, also called accretion, is responsible for a number of different kinds of
stellar variability, many of them being very dramatic indeed. In fact, mass accretion is responsible for some of
the most energetic events in the universe. (More on those in a moment.)

The Algol variables are examples of mass-transferring main-sequence stars. Algols are binary star systems
made of two relatively normal stars where one is transferring matter onto its companion. The variability we see
is caused primarily by eclipses, but we also see variability due to this mass transfer. The most prominent of
these stars is Algol itself, also known as beta Persei, the second brightest star in the constellation Perseus.
Algol is known to be bright in X-rays and has strong stellar flares like solar flares on the Sun. This high energy
variability originates from the interactions of magnetic fields on the individual stars with the mass transfer
stream from one star to the other.

In the long term, mass transfer fundamentally changes the way stars evolve. As we mentioned earlier, the
evolutionary path of a star is defined almost entirely by one parameter: its mass. If you know a star's mass,
then you can predict a star's evolutionary path with great precision. However, what happens if you change the
star's mass mid-way through its lifetime? Changing a star's mass fundamentally changes how the star evolves
over time. If you increase a star's mass, you will increase the speed at which it burns its nuclear fuel and
shorten its lifetime. You might substantially change the interior structure of the star. You might even change a
star's ultimate fate; the way stars end their lives is also very strongly dependent upon its initial mass, and so
adding to a star's mass might make the difference between it ending its life as a non-descript white dwarf or
catastrophically as a supernova.

Stellar Death: white dwarfs and supernovae

Once a star passes through the asymptotic giant branch, what's left for it to do? The answer to that question
varies widely depending upon a star's past history and present circumstances. There are two very important
parameters for a star that determine its eventual fate: how massive is the star at the end of its life, and is it a
single star or a binary? We'll first discuss what part the star's mass plays in how it ends its life.

White dwarfs
First, if a star reaches the end of the AGB with less than about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, it will end its life
as a white dwarf; if more than that, it will collapse into a neutron star ending its life as a supernova explosion.
This mass limit, known as the Chandrasekhar limit, is the limit above which white dwarfs will collapse under
their own weight -- the inward force of gravity becomes stronger than the outward force of electron degeneracy

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pressure, and the white dwarf implodes. The differences between those two fates could not be more different.
Most stars will end their lives as white dwarfs, since most stars are relatively low mass. A star born with less
than about eight times the mass of the Sun can probably lose enough mass during its lifetime to wind up below
the Chandrasekhar limit by the time it dies, and well over 99 percent of all stars in the universe today are below
that mass.

Stars that die as white dwarfs typically pass through one last phase of substantial mass loss, called the post-
asymptotic giant branch (pAGB), and are often variable during this phase since they're in such an unstable
state. The great temperature and pressure of the core serves to blow off most of the outer layers of the star,
and in the process, stars can undergo any number of changes. One of these is pulsation (similar to RV Tauri
pulsation), and pulsations are observed in many pAGB stars. Three other changes are directly related to the
evolutionary changes happening deep inside the star: end-of-life evolutionary changes, very brief outbursts
known as thermal pulses, and dust obscuration. The nuclear reactions that power stars run faster at higher
temperatures and pressures, and so late in a star's life, it is racing through its supply of fuel very quickly.
Evolutionary changes happen on timescales of decades and centuries, and to some extent, these subtle
changes in luminosity and temperature may be visible if we look long and carefully enough. Sometimes the
changes are much faster than that, and more drastic too. Thermal pulses are rapid thermonuclear burning
events deep within the star where a thin layer of accumulated material becomes hot and dense enough to
undergo nuclear fusion. When this happens it happens very quickly, generating even more heat and pressure
that change the surface temperature, size, and luminosity of the star. Finally, the evolutionary changes and
thermal pulses will drive mass loss from the surface of the star, and the mass loss rate at this stage of evolution
is very large. Stars can lose nearly a tenth of a percent of their mass in just one year, which sounds like a
small amount except that it adds up quickly in the space of a thousand years! This lost mass can generate
dust around the star, which can obscure the star itself over time.

There are two types of variables that exemplify these behaviors. One are the R Coronae Borealis stars,
named for the class prototype R CrB. At most times, R CrB hovers near naked-eye visibility at 6th magnitude,
but seemingly at random it undergoes dramatic fades of several magnitudes in as little as two weeks. These
events are almost certainly caused by dust obscuration, but whether each dip is a separate dust-forming event
around the entire star, or simply an obscuration of the star on our line of sight by an orbiting dust cloud isn't
entirely clear. There are about two dozen R CrB stars known today. This is a very small number, due to the
fact that this is a very short stage of a star's life. In the several billion years that a star might live, it might spend
only a few thousand years in the R CrB stage, so we'll only see a handful at a given time.

Another, still rarer class of variables doesn't even have a definitive name yet, although its properties are
exemplified by the strange variable FG Sagittae. Like the R CrB stars, FG Sge is a pAGB star nearing the end
of its life, but is likely to be very far along in this process. Tellingly, FG Sge is surrounded by a spherical shell,
clearly reminiscent of planetary nebulae, and it has likely been shedding mass at a prodigious rate for
thousands of years. FG Sge was discovered in the 1940s as a variable with irregular variability on timescales
of a few days, and by the early 1960s it was clear that it was also slowly brightening by a few percent per year
since the late 19th century. By the late 1960s it leveled of at around 9th magnitude, but in the early 1990's it
underwent a precipitous decline, and it has varied irregularly by several magnitudes since then. It isn't known
exactly what's happening, but the suspicion is that the long-term brightening was a rapid evolutionary change
or the end of a thermal pulse, the result of which was greatly enhanced mass loss. This lost mass is now
starting to condense into dust which obscures the star. The proto-planetary nebula that we see today is
probably the result of previous episodes just like this one in which the star episodically lost mass in the recent
past, and at some point, FG Sge will undergo one last event like this before shedding the last of its outer layers
and leaving behind a planetary nebula and a white dwarf. Two other stars, V605 Aquilae and V4334
Sagittarius (Sakurai's Object), may have already reached this point and are well on their way to becoming
white dwarfs.

After all the envelope has been lost and all of the nuclear burning and evolutionary changes have ceased,
we're left with the final remains of a star's innermost core: a white dwarf. White dwarfs are the white hot
remains of stars, mostly made of carbon and oxygen, and just a few thousand kilometers in size. They no
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longer shine by burning nuclear fuel, but by shedding the leftover heat from their past lives. Even though
they're no longer living stars as we consider them, white dwarfs can still be variables! In particular, white
dwarfs can pulsate, and the physics behind these pulsations is similar to those in normal stars. The only
difference is the pulsation period; instead of taking months, weeks, days, or hours to undergo one pulsation
cycle, it may only take them just a few minutes! White dwarfs are small, dense stars -- no more than a few
thousand kilometers across -- and since the pulsation period is related to how long it takes a perturbation to
travel through the star the variability make take just a few hundred seconds. We study pulsations in white
dwarfs just as we do for the Sun and delta Scuti stars, for the purpose of asteroseismology. Just as in those
main sequence stars, the pulsations of white dwarfs can tell us a great deal about their interiors, and we've
learned a great deal about the properties of matter at very high densities and temperatures by studying them.
We can even study how white dwarf pulsations change slowly over time as the star cools; the hottest white
dwarfs cool fastest, and so it's possible to track their changes over many years and decades and deduce how
quickly the star is cooling. This measurement is an important one for cosmology, since the coolest white
dwarfs in the sky put a lower limit on the age of the universe.

Neutron stars, black holes, and supernovae

So what if a star is above the Chandrasekhar limit when it reaches the end of it's life? Lower mass stars
typically stop their nuclear burning when the core is converted entirely to carbon and oxygen. It takes a great
deal of temperature and pressure to reach the energy levels required to begin the thermonuclear burning of
these elements. You can reach these levels in more massive stars, and in principle you can extract energy
from all thermonuclear reactions up to a hard limit, that of thermonuclear burning of iron. All thermonuclear
burning reactions are exothermic to that point, and so nuclear reactions will help to increase the temperature
and pressure inside a star. If there's enough energy and pressure to star the reaction, you can start burning
oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon, and so on, all the way up to iron. If the core of the star is converted entirely
to iron and then reaches the limit where it can start to burn, it will start to draw energy from its surroundings --
the reaction is endothermic. This is a catastrophe, because it is this very same energy that holds up the outer
layers of the star against collapse, and so the star implodes violently. The result of this implosion is a
supernova, one of the most energetic events in the universe. In a flash, the pent up gravitational potential
energy is released, unleashing runaway nuclear reactions that create every element in the periodic table along
with a storm of subatomic particles that blast away the outer layers of the star at close to the speed of light.
For a few months, the amount of energy released by a supernova can equal the combined light of every other
star in a galaxy -- the light of a hundred billion stars or more.

What's left over from this titanic explosion is again dependent upon the mass of the star. If the collapsed core
is less than about three solar masses, the result will be an ultradense object called a neutron star -- an object
ten kilometers across with three times the mass of the Sun, where all of its matter has been crushed so tightly
that it composed of little more than atomic nuclei. Such objects are the most extreme form of visible matter in
the universe and bear little resemblance to anything else in human experience. Their behavior can be just as
bizarre, making them one of the most extreme kinds of variables known. The first variable neutron star was
discovered in 1967, before it was even known such objects could even exist. A graduate student studying the
universe at radio wavelengths discovered a repeating signal so regular that it was first assumed to originate
from an alien intelligence. It was later found to be an ultradense object spinning on its axis many times per
second, and the variability came from radiation from it's magnetic poles rotating in and out of view. These
objects are now known as pulsars, and some pulsars have been found that spin as quickly as a thousand
times a second. An even more extreme variable neutron star is a magnetar -- a neutron star with a powerful
magnetic field that undergoes enormous outbursts at high energies. Magnetars can emit huge amounts of high
energy radiation detectable from across the entire Milky Way. These outbursts can be so strong that the
radiation can affect the Earth's atmosphere, increasing its temperature and causing it to expand, endangering
satellites in low Earth orbit.

Even these aren't the most extreme fate of massive stars. If a star is above the three solar mass limit, not even
the atomic forces that keep nuclei apart can keep the star from collapsing under the force of its own gravity.
This creates one of the strangest objects in the universe: a black hole. These objects have such strong
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gravitational fields that their escape velocites are larger than the speed of light; anything that comes within a
few kilometers -- a point called the event horizon -- is trapped forever, since there's no way it can travel faster
than light to escape. What happens then? No one knows -- our understanding of the laws of physics breaks
down at such extreme limits. Theorists predict that black holes might emit a kind of radiation, but nothing like
that has ever been observed, and it is impossible to study a black hole directly. But black holes themselves
have been observed indirectly, and this is a good point to begin our final discussion of variables: how they
behave as members of binary stars.

White dwarf, neutron star, and black hole binary stars

Earlier, we mentioned binaries in which one star transferred matter to the other star, in a process called
accretion. In systems where one member of the binary pair is a compact object, the accretion process can
release an enormous amount of energy. The energy generated by accretion comes from gravitational potential
energy, and material falling onto a compact object like a white dwarf, neutron star, or back hole falls into a very
deep potential well. Depending upon how the accretion process occurs, it can release hundreds or thousands
of times the luminous output of the Sun. Such objects are given a universal name of cataclysmic variables,
although their properties vary wildly from one star to another, and are broken down into a number of different
subclassifications.

White dwarf binaries are the most common form of accreting binary system, and they share a number of similar
properties. The dwarf novae are binaries composed of a white dwarf primary and a Sun-like, main-sequence
star in orbit around one another. Material is pulled off of the main-sequence star, and spirals around and down
onto the white dwarf through an accretion disk. Depending upon the rate of mass transfer (how much mass
flows off of the donor star onto the white dwarf), these stars can exhibit a number of different kinds of
variability. All of them will show some low-amplitude, irregular variability caused by the material impacting the
surface of the white dwarf. But in many of these stars the accretion rate is high enough that the accretion disk
itself can go into outburst, brightening by a factor of 100 or more.

The stars SS Cygni and U Geminorum, both discovered in the mid-19th century, are prime examples of this.
SS Cygni goes into outburst roughly once every 80 days, and U Geminorum about once every 200 days. The
outbursts of dwarf novae become more frequent as the mass accretion rate increases, so stars with higher
mass accretion rates outburst more often. Z Camelopardalis is an example of such a star. It rarely goes out
of its outburst state for more than a few days. The Z Cam stars also exhibit another peculiarity in that the
accretion disk can sometimes get stuck in a bright or "high" state, in an event known as a standstill. Such stars
may show vigorous outbursts once every few days for months or years, and then suddenly enter this bright
standstill for months or years more. At the highest mass accretion rates, the accretion disk never goes out of
its outburst state since matter keeps piling onto the disk so quickly. Such stars are called novalike variables for
reasons that will be made clear in a moment. A good example of such a star is V Sagittae, whose wildly
irregular light curve shows little coherence over time. Another example is TT Arietis, a star discovered in the
late 1960s, that for most of its life remains locked in a permanently bright, flat state around magnitude 10, with
very rare extended dips of several magnitudes or more when the mass accretion inexplicably turns off for
weeks or months at a time.

What happens to all the matter that piles up on the white dwarf? Over time, the white dwarf's mass will grow.
Since the accreted material is coming from the outer layers of a normal star, it is mostly hydrogen and helium.
Sometimes, if enough mass builds up on the white dwarf's surface, the temperature and pressure of the
accreted material can rise high enough that it undergoes thermonuclear fusion, just as it would in the star's
core. When this happens, the system becomes a classical nova, brightening not by a factor of 100, but a
factor of 10000 or more for a short time. The word "nova" is the latin word for "new", and that's exactly what
novae appear to be: new stars. They suddenly appear in familiar constellations, where they remain for a few
days or weeks, until fading from view again. There have been a great many famous novae throughout the past
century. Perhaps one of the most famous was Nova Persei 1901, a star now known as GK Persei. Nova Per
1901 brightened from an obscure magnitude around 10 or so all the way to magnitude 1, clearly visible among

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the bright stars of the sky. Over days and weeks if faded from easy view until dropping from naked eye
visibility entirely, becoming a target for the larger telescopes of that era. More recent famous novae include
Nova Delphinium 1967 (HR Del) and Nova Cygni 1992 (V1974 Cyg).

Most novae probably recur on very long timescales, perhaps many centuries or millenia, since it takes them
that long to build up enough mass to trigger a thermonuclear explosion. But in a very few cases, the rate of
mass transfer is high enough and the mass of the white dwarf is high enough that they recur on observable
timescales of years or decades. These are known as recurrent novae. One such nova, U Scorpii, was
recently in the news as its early 2010 outburst was predicted in advance and widely followed by astronomers
around the world. RS Ophiuchi and T Coronae Borealis are two more examples of such novae. These stars
are particularly interesting because it is believed that their white dwarf stars are near the maximum masses for
white dwarf stars, around 1.4 solar masses. Because of this, any mass that accretes onto them will slowly
push the star closer to the Chandrasekhar limit. When this happens, the gravitational collapse of the white
dwarf results not in a classical novae, but in something far larger -- a type Ia supernovae, briefly becoming not
10000 times brighter but billions of times brighter. No one has yet seen a classical or recurrent nova become a
supernova, but it's likely that in the not too distant future, some of the recurrent novae we know today will end
their lives as supernovae.

There are other kinds of accreting white dwarf systems that don't fall into these neat categories. A very similar
type of system involves a normal star and a white dwarf, but the white dwarf has a strong magnetic field, and
its magnetism interferes with the mass accretion and inhibits the formation of an accretion disk. In these
systems, called polars, matter flows onto the white dwarf's magnetic poles along the field lines, releasing a
huge amount of energy as it impacts. The most famous of these stars is AM Herculis, and the polars are also
designated as the "AM Her" objects.

A much different type of system involves a white dwarf in a wide orbit around a giant star, where the white
dwarf isn't accreting from the secondary itself, but instead accretes from a strong wind from these giant stars.
These systems, known as symbiotic stars, often remain quiescent or undergo slow, rolling changes in
brightness for years at a time. Only occasionally will they undergo large outbursts of several magnitudes
caused either by changes in the accretion flow onto the primary, or by the onset of steady thermonuclear
burning on the surface. The star Z Andromedae is the classic example of such a star, and is the class
prototype; discovered in 1901, it has been varying irregularly since its discovery, sometimes weakly oscillating
around 10th magnitude, at other times undergoing decades-long periods of outbursts of two magnitudes or
more.

Rarer cases of accreting binaries with compact primaries involve not white dwarfs but neutron stars and black
holes. Neutron stars and black holes originate from more massive stars; since massive stars are rarer, so too
are the binaries that involve these stars. But when they do occur, they tend to be spectacular. Close binaries
involving a neutron star or black hole rather than a white dwarf are most prominent in X-ray rather than optical
light, and are known as X-ray binaries. Such systems can release an enormous amount of energy in X-rays,
and are often detected first in X-rays and later in the optical. One of the most famous of these was the very
first non-solar X-ray source observed by early satellites in the 1960s. A source called "Scorpius X-1" was first
detected by an Aerobee rocket in 1964, brighter than any other cosmic source barring the Sun and the Moon
(which reflects the X-ray light of the Sun). In 1966 it was identified with an optical source, and given the
variable star designation of V818 Scorpii. It consists of a neutron star and a normal star in a close binary
system, and the X-rays are generated close to the neutron star's surface, where the inner edge of the accretion
disk reaches the star. Material at the surface is traveling so fast -- a significant fraction of the speed of light --
that it emits X-rays rather than optical light on impact. A few dozen of these systems are now known to exist in
our Galaxy.

Another more extreme type of system involves a black hole rather than a neutron star. X-ray source was found
in Cygnus in 1970, and dubbed "Cygnus X-1". Within a few years, the optical counterpart of the X-ray source
was found to be a bright blue star, HD 226868, and was given the name V1357 Cygni. Since the visible
component is a luminous blue star, it had to be massive, several times the mass of the Sun. But the system

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was found to be a binary rather than a single star, and the spectroscopic evidence showed that the companion
to the blue star had to be even more massive, perhaps 10 solar masses or more. Importantly, the companion
was optically faint -- nearly all of the light was coming from the blue star and not the massive companion. This
pointed toward the primary being a new type of object, a black hole. It is likely that both stars formed at about
the same time less than 100 million years ago, and both were very massive. The more massive star of the pair
evolved very quickly, ran out of fuel, and collapsed into a black hole. Its companion, the still visible bright blue
star, is living on borrowed time. If it does not shed several solar masses of material, then it too will run out of
fuel and collapse, either into a neutron star, or into a black hole just like its companion. They will then be a pair
of dead stars, orbiting silently about one another, sensed only by their mutual gravitation. This is perhaps the
most extreme fate for a star's lifetime, and makes a fitting end to this story as well.

Summary
Astronomy is one of the grandest of sciences, having as its subject the entire cosmos in which we live. Variable
stars are just one piece of the scientific puzzle of astronomical research, and there's a great deal more to learn
about stars, Galaxies, and the universe as a whole. With advances in technology have come equal advances in
our understanding of the visible (and invisible) universe, and growth in our knowledge of the universe will
continue for a long time to come.

The study of variable stars remains one of the best ways of learning about stars, and they will remain an
important topic of interest for as long as we need to learn more about stars and the universe in which we live.
There are many more classes of variable star than were discussed here, and each of those can tell us about
the stars that make them up. We encourage you to learn more about them, both on our website
(/vsots_archive), and on your own.

All of these stars and more are open to new scientific study and new insights, and important discoveries can
come from anyone willing to make careful observations and rigorous and honest analysis. You can participate
in the scientific study of variable stars and variable star research. It is the hard and careful work of observers
just like you who have generated the many millions of variable star observations found in the AAVSO
International Database, providing a rich resource for the astronomical community to learn from. We hope you
can join with the thousands of variable star observers who have contributed to the AAVSO over the past
century and become a part of this great endeavor.

Return to Variable Stars and the Stories They Tell

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Translations
Звездна еволюция (https://astroblognikola.blogspot.com/2023/03/blog-post.html) (Bulgarian) by Nicola
Antonov

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