Chandrasekhar limit
Imagine you have a bunch of marbles, and you want to pile them up as high as you can. But if you pile too many marbles on top of each other, the weight of the marbles will cause the pile to collapse.
Something similar happens with stars. In space, there are massive balls of gas called stars. These stars are really big and heavy, and the weight of all that gas makes their insides very hot and squished together.
One of the most important things about a star is how much mass it has. Mass is like how much stuff something is made out of. Just like a heavy stack of marbles can collapse, a star that has too much mass will collapse too.
That's where the Chandrasekhar Limit comes in. It's a special number that tells us how much mass a star can have before it collapses under its own weight. The limit was named after an astrophysicist named Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovered it in the 1930s.
The limit is about 1.4 times the mass of our own sun. That might not sound like a lot, but it's actually a huge amount of mass! If a star has more mass than that, then it will collapse in on itself and become either a neutron star or a black hole.
So, just like you can't pile too many marbles on top of each other, a star can't have too much mass without collapsing. And the Chandrasekhar Limit tells us exactly how much is too much.
Something similar happens with stars. In space, there are massive balls of gas called stars. These stars are really big and heavy, and the weight of all that gas makes their insides very hot and squished together.
One of the most important things about a star is how much mass it has. Mass is like how much stuff something is made out of. Just like a heavy stack of marbles can collapse, a star that has too much mass will collapse too.
That's where the Chandrasekhar Limit comes in. It's a special number that tells us how much mass a star can have before it collapses under its own weight. The limit was named after an astrophysicist named Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovered it in the 1930s.
The limit is about 1.4 times the mass of our own sun. That might not sound like a lot, but it's actually a huge amount of mass! If a star has more mass than that, then it will collapse in on itself and become either a neutron star or a black hole.
So, just like you can't pile too many marbles on top of each other, a star can't have too much mass without collapsing. And the Chandrasekhar Limit tells us exactly how much is too much.
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