Key Terms
- Chandrasekhar limit
- the upper limit to the mass of a white dwarf (equals 1.4 times the mass of the Sun)
- degenerate gas
- a gas that resists further compression because no two electrons can be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing (Pauli exclusion principle)
- millisecond pulsar
- a pulsar that rotates so quickly that it can give off hundreds of pulses per second (and its period is therefore measured in milliseconds)
- neutron star
- a compact object of extremely high density composed almost entirely of neutrons
- nova
- the cataclysmic explosion produced in a binary system, temporarily increasing its luminosity by hundreds to thousands of times
- pulsar
- a variable radio source of small physical size that emits very rapid radio pulses in very regular periods that range from fractions of a second to several seconds; now understood to be a rotating, magnetic neutron star that is energetic enough to produce a detectable beam of radiation and particles
- type II supernova
- a stellar explosion produced at the endpoint of the evolution of stars whose mass exceeds roughly 10 times the mass of the Sun
This book was adapted from the following: Fraknoi, A., Morrison, D., & Wolff, S. C. (2016). Key Terms In Astronomy. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/books/astronomy/pages/23-key-terms under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0
Access the entire book for free at https://openstax.org/books/astronomy/pages/1-introduction
