Today, Professor Zumwalt had been busy setting up the classroom for the lesson ahead. Students were beginning to enter, and Adorah smiled at each student as they entered. She rearranged the room so the desks formed a circle and the middle of the room was empty. "Welcome back everyone! I hope everyone has been doing well," she said with a smile to her students. "Today, we are going to be looking at the life of a star." With that, Professor Zumwalt waved her wand, and the room changed around them, giving the illusion of being in space. The center of the room that had been cleared of desks featured the Horsehead Nebula.
"This is just a projection similar to the ceiling of the Great Hall." She moved towards the center where all the students would be able to see her. "Stars are born in giant gas clouds called nebulae. These are millions of times bigger than this projection. Gas clouds are a collection of gas in space. As gravity pulls more, the blobs get smaller and also heat up. Eventually, they will get so hot and dense that nuclear reactions start inside them, and they turn into stars producing magical essence and sending it out into the universe. The heat and light from these newborn stars can make nebulae glow in different colors." Adorah told the students as the projection zoomed in and showed the students what she was describing.
"So, how long a star lives depends on its mass. The bigger they are, the quicker they die. This might seem odd, but the more mass a star has, then the hotter it gets. The hotter it gets, the quicker it exhausts its fuel supply," Adorah said to her students taking a moment to pause. "Our nearest star, the Sun, will exhaust its supply of hydrogen fuel in around 4 billion years. Then the Sun's core will collapse under its gravity. At the same time, its atmosphere will become unstable and start to expand. This will transform the Sun into a huge red giant star."
"This is not good news for the Earth. Closer planets like Mercury will be completely engulfed by the swelling Sun. Earth will be entirely vaporized, and all life on our planet will end. But there's no reason for alarm, we have a few billion years to plan our escape!" Adorah assured them, as all of these students and herself would be long gone before the Sun started its years of dying. "Over the following billion years, the Sun will gradually die. Now our Sun will turn into a white dwarf, most likely, as it is not large enough to turn into a supernova. When a star a few times larger than the Sun runs out of fuel, its end is far more spectacular. A massive shock wave radiates throughout the whole star, which heats up to around 1 billion°C. Then it explodes as a supernova. This flash is as bright as a whole galaxy and leaves behind a rapidly spinning neutron star."
"That is it for tonight guys!" Adorah concluded the class and departed from the classroom after the students all left. She thought it was a lot of information, but she was sure her students could handle it all.
-
For full credit, RP the lesson.