What Are the Key Gravitational and Nuclear Effects in a Star's Life Cycle?

[Bunting]

I was wondering if anyone knew of any websites which deal with the specfic gravitational and nuclear effects at each age of a stars life. I am going to "try" and create a sun simulator! as a start of OpenGL programming physical simulators, and thought this would be a good start point :)

thanks!

 

[LURCH]

Would http://www.rdale.k12.mn.us/pms/student%20curriculum/Star%20life%20Cycles/splash.html address your needs?

 

[LURCH]

Also, there is an animated time-line at http://charon.sjs.org/~rubysix/chemproj/final/starlife1.html .

But as ussual, http://www.nasa-gdrs.com/nasa-edu/13.html does a better job of explaining.

However, I've noticed that none of the sites I've given you mention the very important part that quantum tunnelling plays in the initiation of fusion. Maybe someone else here can find a link to that.

 

[chroot]

Pick up a texbook that includes quantitative information on stellar evolution. Carroll & Ostlie's "Introduction to Modern Astrophysics" has all the info you'd need to create a [accurate] sun simulator. The central key to the simulation is the requirement of constant hydrostatic equilibrium.

- Warren

 

[fando]

If you want to go hard core, take a peek at Kippenhahn and Weigert's Stellar Structure and Evolution. It provides a comprehensive overview of stellar modeling, including various numerical and computational methods of simulating stars. To keep things simple, you probably want to avoid varying things like metallicity.