The Universe At Large 001 - T Tauri Stars (Part 1 of 2)
07 Nov 2015Undomyr
The Universe At Large; You want to know this, you just don’t know it - T Tauri Stars (Part 1 of 2)Hello and welcome to the first edition of The Universe At Large. This will be a series of articles about both common and exceptional phenomena in the Milky Way Galaxy we call home.
I have no set plan or order in mind yet, I will try to add at least one entry per day, starting with a type of star, the T Tauri star. Why the T Tauri? See? You want to know this and you didn’t know it 5 minutes ago. Gotcha there.
I chose the T Tauri to begin with because I both hate them when I come across them and love them for what they truly are. In short, a T Tauri star is a star in its puberty phase. It’s about as hot as an adult star of the same class, but radiates for more light and is larger than the adult version.
Now why do I hate them? Because they do not blow a nice, scoopable hydrogen mist outwards from their surfaces, like the other stars we can scoop do. The T Tauri doesn’t fuse hydrogen into helium, it simply heats up the hydrogen until it glows and heats up, keeping it close to its chest.
Because a T Tauri does not perform fusion yet it can’t remain a T Tauri forever; a T Tauri rotates, slowly moving more and more atoms into the core like a giant centrifuge. When the core is heavy enough, a complicated reaction involving lithium takes place and in less than a nanosecond the T Tauri goes from a large, intensely bright and large star to a far smaller and much duller adult star that fuses hydrogen into helium. And then the scoop works.
That’s it for now.
In part 2 I will explain;
Why it is called a T Tauri, some more information about its physics and behaviour and whatever else I can think of you might be interested in.
Please leave a message if you have a suggestion, comment or have spotted an error in any of this.
Fly safe, Space Cowboy,
Undomyr, signing off.