A dying star, a scarlet ball of white-hot plasma, is enjoying the last moments of its life. Its surface temperature is just 2300 kelvin. Still, it emits on average eight and a half thousand times more energy than our sun.
CW Leonis is a red giant whose age hasn’t been defined precisely but is estimated to be several billion years. It was a white-blue star with a mass three to five times that of the sun, which transformed into helium.
The star CW Leonis undergoes a thermonuclear reaction that transforms helium nuclei into carbon. As a result, the star’s outer layers cool off and darken. Still, the star’s interior heats up again and the reaction continues.
The star CW Leonis has a 649-day pulsation cycle and emits 6250 times more energy than the sun. The star loses 4 times 10 to the power of 22 tons of material every year on account of this process and approximately seven times the mass of the earth.
Spectral analysis data reveals that CW Leonis’s cloud contains 70 different chemical compounds, including carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia.
CW Leonis may have had planets in the past, but they appear to have been swallowed up early on at the stage of expansion. Some small red dwarf orbiting the giant could well account for mysterious shifts of material in the cloud of gas and dust enveloping the star.
The water content in the star is estimated to be several quintillion tons.
The water vapor’s overall mass is estimated to be just around a billionth of the star’s raw mass according to today’s notions of stellar evolution.
CW Leonis, a red giant star, will transform into a white dwarf star in the next 10000 to 30000 years, after which it will fade away. The shock wave and the mind-boggling temperature in the epicenter will generate new elements, such as uranium, gold, and lead.
