Lecture 32: The Lives of Stars
Why do stars shine? How long do they shine? This lecture describes the\nphysics of stars on the main sequence, describes the mass-luminosity\nrelation of main sequence stars, introduces nuclear fusion power and the\nnuclear fusion lifetimes of stars. From this we gain an important\ninsight into one of the criteria we might apply to the search for life\naround other stars: we want planets around low-mass main sequence stars\nthat can shine more or less steadily for more that 500 Myr to 1 billion\nyears - maybe longer if our goal is to find intelligent life. Recorded\nlive on 2009 Nov 10 in Room 1005 Smith Laboratory on the Columbus campus\nof The Ohio State University.