A video series on stellar evolution

A partnership project to create a series of videos on stellar evolution

Implemented jointly with the YouTube channel “Vsesvit UA”

February – September 2024

Project Components

1. Protostars, stellar populations, and classification;
2. From the main sequence to white dwarfs and neutron stars;
3. Why are most stars in the Universe binary;
4. Why do white dwarfs explode? Cataclysmic variable stars.

Questions-Answers

What was your role in this project?

➔ In this project, our team acted as the authors of the scripts for the videos. We were responsible not only for writing the text itself, but also for its literary and scientific editing. Ivan, in turn, selected the photo and video materials, voiced the text, and edited everything into the final video.

Why did you publish the videos on the “Vsesvit UA” channel rather than on your own?

➔ During the period of this project, we were simultaneously recording and publishing video lectures for our educational course “Variable Stars Lectures” on our own channel, and we considered it inappropriate to interrupt them with videos of a more popular-science format. In addition, by publishing this series specifically on Ivan’s channel (which had about 150,000 subscribers at the time), we expected these videos to reach a much larger audience than they would have if posted on our own channel, which had around 350 subscribers at that time.

Can these videos be used as a basis when studying the topic of stellar evolution, or were they created exclusively as an additional resource?

➔ Yes, of course they can be used. Despite the fact that Vsesvit UA is a popular-science channel, we tried to add more scientific depth to these videos by describing each stage of stellar evolution in detail. In particular, to avoid missing any important aspect of this topic, we prepared not just one collaborative video, but an entire series.

Results

• Four videos about stellar evolution were created, with a total of more than 367,000 views (as of February 2025). In December 2024, they were compiled by Ivan, the author of the “Vsesvit UA” YouTube channel, into a stellar evolution collection over 2 hours long.
• Thanks to the implementation of this project, about 500 new viewers subscribed to our organisation’s YouTube channel.

This project was our first partnership project — and immediately with such a large YouTube channel. However, we consider it only partially successful, since we did not manage to achieve all the goals we had set. It is quite likely that we made several mistakes during its planning and organisation, but every mistake is a new experience and an opportunity to become better!