What is the average lifespan of a star?

Answer 1

Between less than a million years and tens of billions of years!

Stars are big. Because they're big, they're also very massive. That mass is important to the star, it creates intense pressure in the centre which gets hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium (And also Helium into heavier elements but that phase is always less than 5-10% of the star's age). Finally we know that the bigger the star is, the hotter the centre is (more pressure=higher temperature).

However stars can't fight gravity forever: they may be big but they don't have infinite Hydrogen (let's ignore He, C, N, etc) to burn. This means that their age is basically determined by:

1) The amount of fuel they have
2) The rate at which they burn their fuel.

1) is simple, it's just the mass of the star times the fraction of hydrogen (~0.75). So as the mass increases, the amount of fuel increases linearly. Simple!

2) is much more complex. The simplest plot to convince you is the mass-luminosity relationship. Basically it shows how bright a star is(how fast it burns fuel) vs its mass.

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Answer 2

A star's average life span varies with its mass: massive stars can live for millions of years, while low mass stars, like red dwarfs, can live for trillions of years. A star like our Sun can live for roughly 10 billion years on average.

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Answer from HIX Tutor

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.

When evaluating a one-sided limit, you need to be careful when a quantity is approaching zero since its sign is different depending on which way it is approaching zero from. Let us look at some examples.

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