Initial stellar mass

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The mass a star has when it settles onto the main sequence, and the single parameter that determines almost everything that follows: how hot the core runs, which fusion cycle dominates, how long the star lives, how it dies and what it leaves behind. The dependence is steep and counter-intuitive. Luminosity rises far faster than mass, so a star with ten times the fuel consumes it more than a thousand times faster; a star of about 0.1 solar masses can burn hydrogen for something on the order of a trillion years, the Sun for roughly ten billion, and a twenty-solar-mass star for only about ten million. Composition and rotation modulate the outcome, but they adjust the answer rather than choose it. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.