page_title: Helium flash
section_title: Red giants
hierarchical_section_title: Helium flash / Red giants
caption_attribution_description: English: The bright star in the centre of this image is not the star of this show. At the bottom centre is a rather unremarkable smudge of red which is in fact a rare and valuable object. First discovered by amateur Japanese astronomer, Yukio Sakurai, in 1996, and noted as a nova-like object, Sakurai’s discovery turned out to be far more interesting than the supernova he initially supposed it to be. The object is actually a small white dwarf star undergoing a helium flash — one of only a handful of examples of such an event ever witnessed by astronomers. Normally, the white dwarf stage is the last in the life cycle of a low-mass star. In some cases, however, the star reignites in a helium flash and expands to return to a red giant state, ejecting huge amounts of gas and dust in the process, before once again shrinking to become a white dwarf. It is a dramatic and short-lived series of events, and Sakurai’s Object has allowed astronomers a very rare opportunity to study the events in real time. The white dwarf emits sufficient ultraviolet radiation to illuminate the gas it has expelled, which can just be seen in this image as the ring of red material. This image was taken using the FORS instrument, mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.
context_page_description: A helium flash is a very brief thermal runaway nuclear fusion of large quantities of helium into carbon through the triple-alpha process in the core of low mass stars during their red giant phase. A much rarer runaway helium fusion process can also occur on the surface of accreting white dwarf stars.
  Low mass stars do not produce enough gravitational pressure to initiate normal helium fusion. As the hydrogen in the core is exhausted, some of the helium left behind is instead compacted into degenerate matter, supported against gravitational collapse by quantum mechanical pressure rather than thermal pressure. This increases the density and temperature of the core until it reaches approximately 100 million kelvin, which is hot enough to cause helium fusion in the core.
  However, a fundamental quality of degenerate matter is that increases in temperature do not produce an increase in volume of the matter until the thermal pressure becomes so very high that it exceeds degeneracy pressure. In main sequence stars, thermal expansion regulates the core temperature, but in degenerate cores this does not occur.
context_section_description: During the red giant phase of stellar evolution in stars with less than 2.0 M☉ the nuclear fusion of hydrogen ceases in the core as it is depleted, leaving a helium-rich core. While fusion of hydrogen continues in the star's shell causing a continuation of the accumulation of helium ash in the core, making the core denser, the temperature still is unable to reach the level required for helium fusion, as happens in more massive stars. Thus the thermal pressure from fusion is no longer sufficient to counter the gravitational collapse and create the hydrostatic equilibrium found in most stars. This causes the star to start contracting and increasing in temperature until it eventually becomes compressed enough for the helium core to become degenerate matter. This degeneracy pressure is finally sufficient to stop further collapse of the most central material but the rest of the core continues to contract and the temperature continues to rise until it reaches a point (≈1×10⁸ K) at which the helium can ignite and start to fuse.
  The explosive nature of the helium flash arises from its taking place in degenerate matter. Once the temperature reaches 100 million–200 million kelvin and helium fusion begins using the triple-alpha process, the temperature rapidly increases, further raising the helium fusion rate and, because degenerate matter is a good conductor of heat, widening the reaction region.
  However, since degeneracy pressure (which is purely a function of density) is dominating thermal pressure (proportional to the product of density and temperature), the total pressure is only weakly dependent on temperature.  Thus, the dramatic increase in temperature only causes a slight increase in pressure, so there is no stabilizing cooling expansion of the core.
  This runaway reaction quickly climbs to about 100 billion times the star's normal energy production (for a few seconds) until the temperature increases to the point that thermal pressure again becomes dominant, eliminating the degeneracy. The core can then expand and cool down and a stable burning of helium will continue.
  A star with mass greater than about 2.25 M☉ starts to burn helium without its core becoming degenerate, and so does not exhibit this type of helium flash. In a very low-mass star (less than about 0.5 M☉), the core is never hot enough to ignite helium. The degenerate helium core will keep on contracting, and finally becomes a helium white dwarf.
  The helium flash is not directly observable on the surface by electromagnetic radiation. The flash occurs in the core deep inside the star, and the net effect will be that all released energy is absorbed by the entire core, leaving the degenerate state to become nondegenerate. Earlier computations indicated that a nondisruptive mass loss would be possible in some cases, but later star modeling taking neutrino energy loss into account indicates no such mass loss.
  In a one solar mass star, the helium flash is estimated to release about 5×10⁴¹ J, or about 0.3% of the energy release of a 1.5×10⁴⁴ J type Ia supernova, which is triggered by an analogous ignition of carbon fusion in a carbon–oxygen white dwarf.
caption: Sakurai's Object is a white dwarf undergoing a helium flash.[3]
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