Depending on their mass, stars can remain stable for millions and even billions of years. The most massive stars live for “only” about 10 million years, but models predict that the least massive live for much longer—longer than cosmologists believe the universe has existed.

As long as stars are stable, they exist on the “main sequence.” That’s just a fancy word for the best balance between temperature and mass. For a while now, we’ve been exploring the main sequence in depth, and I’ve shown you how stars eventually lose stability and “leave” the main sequence.

As stars exhaust their fuel, their internal structures change drastically. Their cores contract, but their outer layers are forced to expand, and they become giants. You’d think the next thing we’d cover would be what happens to these giant stars, right?

Well…not quite! At this point, something downright weird is going on in their cores, and it’s well worth a closer look…

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