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The
red clump is a feature in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of
starA star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...
s. The red clump is considered the
metalIn astronomy and physical cosmology, the metallicity of an object is the proportion of its matter made up of chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium...
-rich counterpart to the
horizontal branchThe horizontal branch is a stage of stellar evolution which immediately follows the red giant branch in stars whose masses are similar to the Sun's...
. Stars in this part of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram are sometimes called
clump giants. These stars are more luminous than
main sequenceThe main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell...
stars of the same surface temperature (or colder than main sequence stars of comparable luminosity), or above and to the right of the main sequence on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. This period in a
star's evolutionStellar evolution is the process by which a star undergoes a sequence of radical changes during its lifetime. Depending on the mass of the star, this lifetime ranges from only a few million years to trillions of years .Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single...
corresponds to the core helium-burning phase, whereas the main sequence is the core hydrogen-burning phase.
In theory, the absolute luminosities of stars in the red clump are fairly independent of stellar composition or age so that consequently they make good standard candles for estimating astronomical distances both within our galaxy and to nearby galaxies and clusters.
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