Stars are the bright points of light in the night time sky, but what are they? When we watch Star Trek, Star Wars or any of the multitudes of science fiction entertainment stories from Hollywood, we hear about stars, it is assumed we understand them. But do we?

This unit will look at the sun as a basic model of how stars form, what are the principle processes of stars, and what is the probable outcome of our star. Then using our star as a basic model we will look at stars of all types, from brown dwarfs to blue giants. Several hundred years of observations and validation of theories will be summarized in a project asking to explain how the individual sources of light and heat in the universe develop and proceed into the final stages.

As always we will look at the Active learning experience. These documents guide the student through the chapters of study in an organized manner. The students need to complete the questions in the same order as they are presented in the ALE. By doing this the student will be exposed to the material twice before they need to read it.

There are four lectures on the development or examination of the life of stars. These lectures are from the Swinburne Online Education Exploring Stars and the Milky Way series. These are additional information that will aid in the more thorough students responses. I require that to be eligible for higher grades that students must make a effort at adding explanations, elaborations, descriptions and examples to their answers. Diagrams are also appropriate, but they must be accompanied by an explanation that goes beyond that offered by the text book.

The last part is a poster project for the unit. I am not usually interested in posters as they tend to be merely a repetition of material without any elaboration. However, I have spent some time in constructing this exercise and I hope to be able to create a higher product with this style of communication.

• ALE Star formation
• ALE Stellar death
• Project evolution of stars
• Assessment Stellar Evolution
• ref evlution of stars
• ref H-R Spectral types
• ref life-main-sequence
• ref star birth