Hawking Radiation
...a human being is seventy-five years. When a person hears of a stars life span is millions of years they can not imagine something living that long. When all they need to do is think of a star as a person, going through the same life cycle, they are born, they live and they die. Some stars die quietly, while others go out with a bang, and some suffer until they die. The suffering death comes from a process of Hawking radiation; this is how a black hole "dies". Before a black hole becomes a black hole it will go through many stages, until finally Hawking Radiation occurs.
The initial phase of stellar evolution is contraction of the protostar from the interstellar gas, which consists of mostly hydrogen, some helium, and traces of heavier elements. In this stage, which typically lasts millions of years, half the gravitational potential energy released by the collapsing protostar is radiated away and half goes into increasing the temperature of the forming star. Eventually the temperature becomes high enough for thermonuclear reactions to begin; if the mass of the protostar is too small to raise the temperature to the ignition point for the thermonuclear reaction, the result is a brown dwarf, or "failed star." In these thermonuclear reactions, loosely called "hydrogen burning," four hydrogen nuclei are fused to form a helium nucleus. This point in time is conventionally called age zero.
Many protostar contractions have been observed in isolated gas clouds; that is, where one cloud contracted to form one star. However, in 1995, the first example of a star-forming region was found in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light-years from the earth. In this region, stars are being formed at the tips of long, fingerlike columns stretching from a huge cloud of interstellar gas and dust; the columns are being eroded by radiation, a process called photo evaporation, from stars in...
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