• Question: What is the average lifetime of a dwarf?

    Asked by Leah to Gavin, Karen, Mark, Michel, Roisin on 12 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Karen

      Karen answered on 12 Nov 2016:

      Hi Leah,
      I’m assuming you mean dwarf as in short person as opposed to red dwarf stars etc. Anyway their lifespan is not generally affected by their condition and the have the same approx lifespan as others without the condition ?

    • Photo: Mark Kennedy

      Mark Kennedy answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      And I’ll go the other way to Karen, and assume you mean a red dwarf star 😛

      Dwarf stars have unbelievably long lifespans. This is because they are so small that they fuse very little hydrogen in their cores (in fact, some dwarfs aren’t even massive enough to fuse any hydrogen, which means they can’t even really be called stars).

      As a consequence, red dwarfs are not very hot (compared to the Sun). Their expected life span is longer than the estimated age of the Universe – of order trillions of years!!!

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