Evolving H-R Diagram

The animation below shows how the H-R diagram of a population of stars that formed at the same time changes as the stars evolve off the main sequence and onto the giant branch. The movie speed is constant, which means that the the relative duration of the different evolutionary stages is realistic; massive stars evolve first and very quickly while low-mass stars evolve much more closely. All the rapid action occurs in the first Gyr, in the second Gyr the evolution slows down, and after the second Gyr the evolution is so slow that it is very hard to discern by eye.

Movie made by Robin Ciardullo using the PARSEC isochrones (Bressan et al. 2012) available through this link.