USTHB English Speakers Magazine USTHB English Speakers Magazine 1st Edition | Page 6

RED DWARFS
By Abdallah BENELMADJAT
Red Dwarfs are the most
common kind of stars in the
Universe, they are considered
as «main sequence stars» but
they have a very low mass,
only 7 to 50 percent the mass
of our sun, and also a cooler
temperature.
Like all stars, Red Dwarfs
fuse Hydrogen into Helium,
but instead of accumulating
all the fused Helium in their
core, they stay convective,
meaning that they are able
to keep the Hydrogen fuel
mixing into their core, thus
conserving their fuel for much
longer than other stars.
These burn so slowly that
their average lifespan is
between one and ten trillion
years,when the life of a red
dwarf is about to end, its
Hydrogen runs out, it shrinks
becoming a blue dwarf,
burning out completely. After
its fuel is spent, it transforms
into a white dwarf, an object
about the size of Earth,
packed very densely and
made of degenerate gasses.
05
Having no energy left, it will
cool extremely slowly over
trillions of years until it gets
its final form: a cold black
dwarf.
Red Dwarfs are also interesting
because they can potentially
host life. The Kepler space
observatory found that at
least half of all red dwarfs
host rock planets between
half and four times the mass
of our Earth. Many of them
are in the habitable zone,
the area around a star where
water can be liquid, but since
red dwarfs burn at relatively
cold temperatures, a planet
would need to be really close
to being hospitable. There
are an estimated 60 billion
potentially habitable planets
around red dwarfs, and that’s
in the Milky Way alone, so red
dwarfs might become really
important for our survival in
the future.