Hertzsprung-russell Diagram :: essays research papers

The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram or, the H-R Diagram for short, is a graph which plots stars according to their temperature and haughty order of magnitude. This graph reveals a pattern, which in fact is quite interesting. The H-R Diagram is named for the 2 astronomers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Russell, who discove cherry-red this pattern of stars. These twain astronomers independently discovered that canvas magnitudes and spectral class (color) of stars yielded a lot of information about them. single key purpose of the H-R diagram is to show the relationship between temperature and inviolate magnitude of stars. The type of temperature measurement used is thousand, where the zero point is mates to -273.16 C. On the H-R Diagram, the temperature of degrees kB ranges from 3,000 to 30,000. The absolute magnitude of stars on the H-R Diagram ranges from +15 to -10. Absolute magnitude is how bright stars would step up if they were positioned at 32.6 light historic period away f rom earth. On this scale, the lower the number, the brighter the star. Thus, a start with an absolute magnitude of -10 would be much brighter than a star with an absolute magnitude of +15. The two astronomers found many patterns after developing their graph. They found that 90% of stars graphed venomous within a band that ran through the middle of the graph. These stars range from cool, dim, red stars at the lower right of the H-R Diagram to hot, bright, blue stars at the upper left corner of the H-R Diagram. The stars that fall into to this band are know as main- episode stars. Stars such as the sun, and almost every start visible in the night sky fall within this band of main sequence stars. There is another group of stars which are cool and bright that appear near the upper right corner of the H-R Diagram. These stars are very heroic and therefore have very big rebel areas. These large surface areas give off large amounts of light and this makes the stars bright. Most of thes e stars are known as red giants. Some are so large hitherto that they are referred to as supergiants. Red giants have a temperature of about 3,500 degrees Kelvin and an absolute magnitude of around 0. Supergiants have a temperature of around 3,000 degrees Kelvin and an absolute magnitude of about -7. Another group of stars, which are quite small, is found near the bottom left of the H-R Diagram.