Red giant
Encyclopedia
A red giant is a luminous giant star
of low or intermediate mass (roughly 0.5–10 solar mass
es) in a late phase of stellar evolution
. The outer atmosphere is inflated and tenuous, making the radius immense and the surface temperature low, somewhere from 5,000 K and lower. The appearance of the red giant is from yellow orange to red, including the spectral types
K and M, but also class S stars and most carbon star
s.
The most common red giants are the so-called red giant branch stars (RGB stars) whose shells are still fusing hydrogen
into helium, while the core is inactive helium. Another case of red giants are the asymptotic giant branch
stars (AGB) that produce carbon from helium by the triple-alpha process
. To the AGB stars belong the carbon stars of type C-N and late C-R.
Prominent bright red giants in the night sky include Aldebaran
(Alpha Tauri), Arcturus (Alpha Bootis), and Gamma Crucis
(Gacrux), while the even larger Antares
(Alpha Scorpii) and Betelgeuse
(Alpha Orionis) are red supergiants.
Red giants are stars with radii tens to hundreds of times larger than that of the Sun
which have exhausted the supply of hydrogen
in their cores and switched to fusing hydrogen in a shell outside the core. The main sequence stars of spectral types A through K are believed to become red giants.
In fact, red giants are not big red spheres with sharp stellar limbs, as seen in many depictions. Due to the very low density such stars may not have a sharp photosphere
but a star body which gradually transfers into a 'corona
'.
stars with masses in the range from about 0.5 solar masses to somewhere between 4 and 6 solar masses. When a star initially forms
from a collapsing molecular cloud
in the interstellar medium
, it contains primarily hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of "metals
" (elements with atomic number
> 2, i. e. every element except hydrogen and helium). These elements are all uniformly mixed throughout the star. The star reaches the main sequence when the core reaches a temperature high enough to begin fusing hydrogen
(a few million Kelvin) and establish hydrostatic equilibrium
. Over its main sequence life, the star slowly converts the hydrogen in the core into helium; its main sequence life ends when nearly all the hydrogen in the core has been used. For the Sun
, the main sequence lifetime is approximately 10 billion years; the lifetime is shorter for more massive stars and longer for less massive stars.
When the star exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core, nuclear reactions in the core stop, so the core begins to contract due to its gravity. This heats a shell just outside the core, where hydrogen remains, initiating fusion of hydrogen to helium in the shell. The higher temperatures lead to increasing reaction rates, producing enough energy to increase the star's luminosity by a factor of 1,000–10,000. The outer layers of the star then expand greatly, beginning the red giant phase of the star's life. Due to the expansion of the outer layers of the star, the energy produced in the core of the star is spread over a much larger surface area, resulting in a lower surface temperature
and a shift in the star's visible light output towards the red – hence red giant, even though the color usually is orange. At this time, the star is said to be ascending the red giant branch of the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. The outer layers are convective
, which causes material exposed to nuclear "burning"
in the star's interior (but not its core) to be brought to the star's surface for the first time in the star's history, an event called the first dredge-up
.
The mechanism that ends the complete collapse of the core and the ascent up the red giant branch depends on the mass of the star. For the Sun and red giants less than 2.571 solar masses, the core will become dense enough that electron degeneracy pressure will prevent it from collapsing further. Once the core is degenerate, it will continue to heat until it reaches a temperature of roughly 108 K, hot enough to begin fusing helium to carbon via the triple-alpha process
. Once the degenerate core reaches this temperature, the entire core will begin helium fusion nearly simultaneously in a so-called helium flash
. In more massive stars, the collapsing core will reach 108 K before it is dense enough to be degenerate, so helium fusion will begin much more smoothly, with no helium flash. Once the star is fusing helium in its core, it contracts and is no longer considered a red giant. The core helium fusing phase of a star's life is called the horizontal branch
in metal-poor stars, so named because these stars lie on a nearly horizontal line in the H-R diagram of many star clusters. Metal-rich helium-fusing stars instead lie on the so-called red clump
in the H-R diagram.
In stars massive enough to ignite helium fusion
, an analogous process occurs when central helium is exhausted and the star switches to fusing helium in a shell, although with the additional complication that in many cases hydrogen fusion will continue in a shell at lesser depth. This puts stars onto the asymptotic giant branch
, a second red giant phase. More massive stars continue to repeat this cycle, fusing heavier elements in successive phases, each lasting more briefly than the previous.
A solar mass star will never fuse carbon. Instead, at the end of the asymptotic giant branch phase the star will eject its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula
with the core of the star exposed, ultimately becoming a white dwarf
. The ejection of the planetary nebula finally ends the red giant phase of the star's evolution.
The red giant phase typically lasts only a few million years and hence is very brief compared to the billions of years that stars of roughly solar mass will spend on the main sequence.
Very high mass stars instead develop to supergiant
stars that wander back and forth horizontally over the HR diagram, at the right end constituting red supergiant
s. These usually end their life as type II supernova
.
The Sun
is predicted to become a red giant in approximately 7.5 billion years. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of the solar system
's inner planets, up to Earth, and its radius will expand to a minimum of 200 times its current value. The Sun will lose a significant fraction of its mass in the process of becoming a red giant, and there is a chance that Mars
and all the outer planets will escape as their resulting orbits will widen. Mercury
and most likely Venus
will have been swallowed by Sun's outer layer at this time. Earth
's fate is less clear. Earth could technically achieve a widening of its orbit and could potentially maintain a sufficiently high angular velocity to keep it from becoming engulfed. In order to do so, its orbit needs to increase to between 1.3 AU and 1.7 AU. However the results of studies announced in 2008 show that due to tidal interaction
between Sun and Earth, Earth would actually fall back into a lower orbit, and get engulfed and incorporated inside the sun before the Sun reaches its largest size, despite the Sun losing about 38% of its mass.
Before this happens, Earth's biosphere
will have long been destroyed by the Sun's steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles and its core contracts, even before the transition to a red giant. After just over 1 billion years, the extra solar energy input will cause Earth's oceans to evaporate and the hydrogen from the water to be lost permanently to space, with total loss of water by 3 billion years. Earth's atmosphere
and lithosphere
will become like those of Venus. Over another billion years, most of the atmosphere will get lost in space as well, ultimately leaving Earth as a desiccated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock.
Giant star
A giant star is a star with substantially larger radius and luminosity than a main sequence star of the same surface temperature. Typically, giant stars have radii between 10 and 100 solar radii and luminosities between 10 and 1,000 times that of the Sun. Stars still more luminous than giants are...
of low or intermediate mass (roughly 0.5–10 solar mass
Solar mass
The solar mass , , is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, used to indicate the masses of other stars and galaxies...
es) in a late phase of stellar evolution
Stellar evolution
Stellar 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...
. The outer atmosphere is inflated and tenuous, making the radius immense and the surface temperature low, somewhere from 5,000 K and lower. The appearance of the red giant is from yellow orange to red, including the spectral types
Stellar classification
In astronomy, stellar classification is a classification of stars based on their spectral characteristics. The spectral class of a star is a designated class of a star describing the ionization of its chromosphere, what atomic excitations are most prominent in the light, giving an objective measure...
K and M, but also class S stars and most carbon star
Carbon star
A carbon star is a late-type star similar to a red giant whose atmosphere contains more carbon than oxygen; the two elements combine in the upper layers of the star, forming carbon monoxide, which consumes all the oxygen in the atmosphere, leaving carbon atoms free to form other carbon compounds,...
s.
The most common red giants are the so-called red giant branch stars (RGB stars) whose shells are still fusing hydrogen
Stellar nucleosynthesis
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the collective term for the nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the elements heavier than hydrogen. Some small quantity of these reactions also occur on the stellar surface under various circumstances...
into helium, while the core is inactive helium. Another case of red giants are the asymptotic giant branch
Asymptotic Giant Branch
The asymptotic giant branch is the region of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram populated by evolving low to medium-mass stars. This is a period of stellar evolution undertaken by all low to intermediate mass stars late in their lives....
stars (AGB) that produce carbon from helium by the triple-alpha process
Triple-alpha process
The triple alpha process is a set of nuclear fusion reactions by which three helium-4 nuclei are transformed into carbon.Older stars start to accumulate helium produced by the proton–proton chain reaction and the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen cycle in their cores...
. To the AGB stars belong the carbon stars of type C-N and late C-R.
Prominent bright red giants in the night sky include Aldebaran
Aldebaran
Aldebaran is a red giant star located about 65 light years away in the zodiac constellation of Taurus. With an average apparent magnitude of 0.87 it is the brightest star in the constellation and is one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky...
(Alpha Tauri), Arcturus (Alpha Bootis), and Gamma Crucis
Gamma Crucis
Gamma Crucis , often called Gacrux, is a red giant star approximately 88 light-years away in the constellation of Crux. Among Portuguese-speaking peoples it is also named "Rubídea" , in reference to its color. The star is the third-brightest star in Crux and one of the brightest stars in the...
(Gacrux), while the even larger Antares
Antares
Antares is a red supergiant star in the Milky Way galaxy and the sixteenth brightest star in the nighttime sky . Along with Aldebaran, Spica, and Regulus it is one of the four brightest stars near the ecliptic...
(Alpha Scorpii) and Betelgeuse
Betelgeuse
Betelgeuse, also known by its Bayer designation Alpha Orionis , is the eighth brightest star in the night sky and second brightest star in the constellation of Orion, outshining its neighbour Rigel only rarely...
(Alpha Orionis) are red supergiants.
Characteristics
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
which have exhausted the supply of hydrogen
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the chemical element with atomic number 1. It is represented by the symbol H. With an average atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant chemical element, constituting roughly 75% of the Universe's chemical elemental mass. Stars in the main sequence are mainly...
in their cores and switched to fusing hydrogen in a shell outside the core. The main sequence stars of spectral types A through K are believed to become red giants.
In fact, red giants are not big red spheres with sharp stellar limbs, as seen in many depictions. Due to the very low density such stars may not have a sharp photosphere
Photosphere
The photosphere of an astronomical object is the region from which externally received light originates. The term itself is derived from Ancient Greek roots, φῶς, φωτός/phos, photos meaning "light" and σφαῖρα/sphaira meaning "sphere", in reference to the fact that it is a spheric surface perceived...
but a star body which gradually transfers into a 'corona
Corona
A corona is a type of plasma "atmosphere" of the Sun or other celestial body, extending millions of kilometers into space, most easily seen during a total solar eclipse, but also observable in a coronagraph...
'.
Stellar evolution
Red giants are evolved from main sequenceMain sequence
The 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 with masses in the range from about 0.5 solar masses to somewhere between 4 and 6 solar masses. When a star initially forms
Star formation
Star formation is the process by which dense parts of molecular clouds collapse into a ball of plasma to form a star. As a branch of astronomy star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium and giant molecular clouds as precursors to the star formation process and the study of young...
from a collapsing molecular cloud
Molecular cloud
A molecular cloud, sometimes called a stellar nursery if star formation is occurring within, is a type of interstellar cloud whose density and size permits the formation of molecules, most commonly molecular hydrogen ....
in the interstellar medium
Interstellar medium
In astronomy, the interstellar medium is the matter that exists in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, dust, and cosmic rays. It fills interstellar space and blends smoothly into the surrounding intergalactic space...
, it contains primarily hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of "metals
Metallicity
In 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...
" (elements with atomic number
Atomic number
In chemistry and physics, the atomic number is the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom and therefore identical to the charge number of the nucleus. It is conventionally represented by the symbol Z. The atomic number uniquely identifies a chemical element...
> 2, i. e. every element except hydrogen and helium). These elements are all uniformly mixed throughout the star. The star reaches the main sequence when the core reaches a temperature high enough to begin fusing hydrogen
Stellar nucleosynthesis
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the collective term for the nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the elements heavier than hydrogen. Some small quantity of these reactions also occur on the stellar surface under various circumstances...
(a few million Kelvin) and establish hydrostatic equilibrium
Hydrostatic equilibrium
Hydrostatic equilibrium or hydrostatic balance is the condition in fluid mechanics where a volume of a fluid is at rest or at constant velocity. This occurs when compression due to gravity is balanced by a pressure gradient force...
. Over its main sequence life, the star slowly converts the hydrogen in the core into helium; its main sequence life ends when nearly all the hydrogen in the core has been used. For the Sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
, the main sequence lifetime is approximately 10 billion years; the lifetime is shorter for more massive stars and longer for less massive stars.
When the star exhausts the hydrogen fuel in its core, nuclear reactions in the core stop, so the core begins to contract due to its gravity. This heats a shell just outside the core, where hydrogen remains, initiating fusion of hydrogen to helium in the shell. The higher temperatures lead to increasing reaction rates, producing enough energy to increase the star's luminosity by a factor of 1,000–10,000. The outer layers of the star then expand greatly, beginning the red giant phase of the star's life. Due to the expansion of the outer layers of the star, the energy produced in the core of the star is spread over a much larger surface area, resulting in a lower surface temperature
Effective temperature
The effective temperature of a body such as a star or planet is the temperature of a black body that would emit the same total amount of electromagnetic radiation...
and a shift in the star's visible light output towards the red – hence red giant, even though the color usually is orange. At this time, the star is said to be ascending the red giant branch of the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. The outer layers are convective
Convection
Convection is the movement of molecules within fluids and rheids. It cannot take place in solids, since neither bulk current flows nor significant diffusion can take place in solids....
, which causes material exposed to nuclear "burning"
Stellar nucleosynthesis
Stellar nucleosynthesis is the collective term for the nuclear reactions taking place in stars to build the nuclei of the elements heavier than hydrogen. Some small quantity of these reactions also occur on the stellar surface under various circumstances...
in the star's interior (but not its core) to be brought to the star's surface for the first time in the star's history, an event called the first dredge-up
Dredge-up
Dredge-up refers to a period in the evolution of a star where a surface convection zone extends down to the layers where material has undergone nuclear fusion...
.
The mechanism that ends the complete collapse of the core and the ascent up the red giant branch depends on the mass of the star. For the Sun and red giants less than 2.571 solar masses, the core will become dense enough that electron degeneracy pressure will prevent it from collapsing further. Once the core is degenerate, it will continue to heat until it reaches a temperature of roughly 108 K, hot enough to begin fusing helium to carbon via the triple-alpha process
Triple-alpha process
The triple alpha process is a set of nuclear fusion reactions by which three helium-4 nuclei are transformed into carbon.Older stars start to accumulate helium produced by the proton–proton chain reaction and the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen cycle in their cores...
. Once the degenerate core reaches this temperature, the entire core will begin helium fusion nearly simultaneously in a so-called helium flash
Helium flash
A helium flash is the runaway fusion of helium in the core of low mass stars of less than about 2.25 solar masses and greater than about 0.5 solar mass, or on the surface of an accreting white dwarf star. They may also occur in the outer layers of larger stars in shell flashes...
. In more massive stars, the collapsing core will reach 108 K before it is dense enough to be degenerate, so helium fusion will begin much more smoothly, with no helium flash. Once the star is fusing helium in its core, it contracts and is no longer considered a red giant. The core helium fusing phase of a star's life is called the horizontal branch
Horizontal branch
The 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...
in metal-poor stars, so named because these stars lie on a nearly horizontal line in the H-R diagram of many star clusters. Metal-rich helium-fusing stars instead lie on the so-called red clump
Red clump
The red clump is a feature in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stars. The red clump is considered the metal-rich counterpart to the horizontal branch. Stars in this part of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram are sometimes called clump giants...
in the H-R diagram.
In stars massive enough to ignite helium fusion
Helium fusion
Helium fusion is a kind of nuclear fusion, with the nuclei involved being helium.The fusion of helium-4 nuclei is known as the triple-alpha process, because fusion of just two helium nuclei only produces beryllium-8, which is unstable and breaks back down to two helium nuclei with a half-life of...
, an analogous process occurs when central helium is exhausted and the star switches to fusing helium in a shell, although with the additional complication that in many cases hydrogen fusion will continue in a shell at lesser depth. This puts stars onto the asymptotic giant branch
Asymptotic Giant Branch
The asymptotic giant branch is the region of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram populated by evolving low to medium-mass stars. This is a period of stellar evolution undertaken by all low to intermediate mass stars late in their lives....
, a second red giant phase. More massive stars continue to repeat this cycle, fusing heavier elements in successive phases, each lasting more briefly than the previous.
A solar mass star will never fuse carbon. Instead, at the end of the asymptotic giant branch phase the star will eject its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula
Planetary nebula
A planetary nebula is an emission nebula consisting of an expanding glowing shell of ionized gas ejected during the asymptotic giant branch phase of certain types of stars late in their life...
with the core of the star exposed, ultimately becoming a white dwarf
White dwarf
A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a small star composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. They are very dense; a white dwarf's mass is comparable to that of the Sun and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth. Its faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored...
. The ejection of the planetary nebula finally ends the red giant phase of the star's evolution.
The red giant phase typically lasts only a few million years and hence is very brief compared to the billions of years that stars of roughly solar mass will spend on the main sequence.
Stars that do not become red giants
Very low mass stars are thought to be fully convective and thus may not accumulate an inert core of helium, and thus may exhaust all of their fuel without ever becoming red giants. Such stars are commonly referred to as red dwarfs. The predicted lifespan of these stars is much larger than the current age of the universe, and hence there are no actual observations of these stars aging.Very high mass stars instead develop to supergiant
Supergiant
Supergiants are among the most massive stars. They occupy the top region of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. In the Yerkes spectral classification, supergiants are class Ia or Ib . They typically have bolometric absolute magnitudes between -5 and -12...
stars that wander back and forth horizontally over the HR diagram, at the right end constituting red supergiant
Red supergiant
Red supergiants are supergiant stars of spectral type K or M. They are the largest stars in the universe in terms of volume, although they are not the most massive...
s. These usually end their life as type II supernova
Supernova
A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...
.
The Sun as a red giant
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
is predicted to become a red giant in approximately 7.5 billion years. It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of the solar system
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
's inner planets, up to Earth, and its radius will expand to a minimum of 200 times its current value. The Sun will lose a significant fraction of its mass in the process of becoming a red giant, and there is a chance that Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
and all the outer planets will escape as their resulting orbits will widen. Mercury
Mercury (planet)
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the Solar System, orbiting the Sun once every 87.969 Earth days. The orbit of Mercury has the highest eccentricity of all the Solar System planets, and it has the smallest axial tilt. It completes three rotations about its axis for every two orbits...
and most likely Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
will have been swallowed by Sun's outer layer at this time. Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
's fate is less clear. Earth could technically achieve a widening of its orbit and could potentially maintain a sufficiently high angular velocity to keep it from becoming engulfed. In order to do so, its orbit needs to increase to between 1.3 AU and 1.7 AU. However the results of studies announced in 2008 show that due to tidal interaction
Roche limit
The Roche limit , sometimes referred to as the Roche radius, is the distance within which a celestial body, held together only by its own gravity, will disintegrate due to a second celestial body's tidal forces exceeding the first body's gravitational self-attraction...
between Sun and Earth, Earth would actually fall back into a lower orbit, and get engulfed and incorporated inside the sun before the Sun reaches its largest size, despite the Sun losing about 38% of its mass.
Before this happens, Earth's biosphere
Biosphere
The biosphere is the global sum of all ecosystems. It can also be called the zone of life on Earth, a closed and self-regulating system...
will have long been destroyed by the Sun's steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles and its core contracts, even before the transition to a red giant. After just over 1 billion years, the extra solar energy input will cause Earth's oceans to evaporate and the hydrogen from the water to be lost permanently to space, with total loss of water by 3 billion years. Earth's atmosphere
Atmosphere
An atmosphere is a layer of gases that may surround a material body of sufficient mass, and that is held in place by the gravity of the body. An atmosphere may be retained for a longer duration, if the gravity is high and the atmosphere's temperature is low...
and lithosphere
Lithosphere
The lithosphere is the rigid outermost shell of a rocky planet. On Earth, it comprises the crust and the portion of the upper mantle that behaves elastically on time scales of thousands of years or greater.- Earth's lithosphere :...
will become like those of Venus. Over another billion years, most of the atmosphere will get lost in space as well, ultimately leaving Earth as a desiccated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock.