Today I read a great quote of encouragement from Willis Read:

“Go for the moon. If you don't get it, you'll still be heading for a star.”

I love the way this ties in both motivation and astronomy. As I try to keep myself motivated to maintain the best grade (and consequently) the best GPA I can, I thought I'd mention that today's lecture discussed what takes during the life stages of a low-mass star such as our Sun.

Without getting as technical as I could, I find the death stages the most fascinating of them all. After spending much of its life fusing Hydrogen into Helium, finding the right balance between thermal pressure and gravity, the star goes through a series of fusion cycles. First forming Hydrogen into Helium, then Helium into Carbon, all the while fighting to counteract gravity's crush.

It turns out that the picture I previously had on my home page of the Eskimo Nebula is not one of a nebula of gas and dust, but of a dying star which has ejected its gaseous outer layers into space. Fascinating! A low-mass star such as our Sun, eventually becomes what is called a white dwarf- just a very hot, exposed dead Carbon core, such as the one pictured below: