How does the main-sequence lifespan of a star 20 times the Sun's mass compare to the Sun's 10 billion years?
Answer
It might last only 10 million years
The extraordinary brightness of massive stars comes at the expense of their fuel efficiency. The extreme core conditions that facilitate high luminosity—primarily utilizing the CNO cycle—cause these stars to consume their core hydrogen supply at an astonishingly rapid rate. While a star comparable to the Sun has a main-sequence lifetime extending into billions of years (estimated around 10 billion years), a star possessing twenty times the mass of the Sun exhausts its primary fuel source in a drastically shorter period, potentially lasting only about 10 million years before evolving to the next stage of stellar life.
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