Red giant brightness so common on both types of stars. Red giants are evolved from main-sequence stars with masses in the range from about to around . When a star initially forms from a collapsing molecular cloud in the interstellar medium, it contains primarily hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of "metals" (in stellar structure, this simply refers to "any" element that is not hydrogen or helium i.e. atomic number greater than 2). These elements are all uniformly mixed throughout the star. The star reaches the main sequence when the core reaches a temperature high enough to begin fusing hydrogen (a few
Gas giant electrical conductor. The gas giants' cores are thought to consist of heavier elements at such high temperatures (20,000 K) and pressures that their properties are poorly understood. The defining differences between a very low-mass brown dwarf and a gas giant (estimated at about 13 Jupiter masses) are debated. One school of thought is based on formation; the other, on the physics of the interior. Part of the debate concerns whether "brown dwarfs" must, by definition, have experienced nuclear fusion at some point in their history. The term "gas giant" was coined in 1952 by the science fiction writer James Blish