(a) Why are massive stars important for the development of the universe?
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Answer:
If what we have described so far were the whole story of the evolution of stars and elements, we would have a big problem on our hands. We will see in later chapters that in our best models of the first few minutes of the universe, everything starts with the two simplest elements—hydrogen and helium (plus a tiny bit of lithium). All the predictions of the models imply that no heavier elements were produced at the beginning of the universe. Yet when we look around us on Earth, we see lots of other elements besides hydrogen and helium. These elements must have been made (fused) somewhere in the universe, and the only place hot enough to make them is inside stars. One of the fundamental discoveries of twentieth-century astronomy is that the stars are the source of most of the chemical richness that characterizes our world and our lives.
We have already seen that carbon and some oxygen are manufactured inside the lower-mass stars that become red giants. But where do the heavier elements we know and love (such as the silicon and iron inside Earth, and the gold and silver in our jewelry) come from? The kinds of stars we have been discussing so far never get hot enough at their centers to make these elements. It turns out that such heavier elements can be formed only late in the lives of more massive stars.
massive stars have a fundamental influence over the interstellar medium and galactic evolution because they are the responsible of the ionization of the surrounding gas and they deposit mechanical energy first via strong stellar winds and later as supernovae, enriching the interstellar medium by returning unprocessed and nuclear processed material during their whole life. Massive stars therefore condition their environment and supply it with new material available for the birth of new generations of stars, being even the triggering mechanism of star formation. They also generate most of the ultraviolet ionization radiation in galaxies, and power the far-infrared luminosities through the heating of dust. The combined action of stellar winds and supernovae explosions in massive young stellar clusters leads to the formation of super-bubbles that may derive in galactic super-winds. Furthermore, massive stars are the progenitors of the most energetic phenomenon nowadays found, the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), as they collapse as supernova explotions into black holes. Particularly, the interest in hot luminous stars has increased in the last decade because of the massive star formation at high redshift and the results of numerical simulations regarding the formation of the firsts stars at zero metallicity (Population III stars), that are thought to be very massive stars with masses around 100 100M⊙.