What Is A Star Essay

The changes that occur during a star 's life are called stellar evolution. The mass of a star determines the ultimate fate of a star. Stars that are more massive burn their fuel quicker and lead shorter lives. Because stars shine, they must change. The energy they lose by emitting light must come from the matter of which the star is made. This will lead to a change in its composition. Stars are formed from the material between stars, shine until they exhaust their fuel, and then die a predictable death based upon their initial mass.

2) Why are there different brightness of stars and how do we describe their brightness as compared to one another?

The sun is a star that is made up of hydrogen gas. The sun is unlike other stars that we see in the sky because the sun delivers energy and radiation that allows to living things to exist. Also, the sun is much closer than the other stars in the sky.

The apparent and absolute magnitudes of the sun is -26.8 and 4.8 that is an average star.

2. The Milky Way galaxy is the constellation that earth belongs to, the sun is just another star within it.

5. On what kind of diagram are stars plotted according to their surface temperature and luminosity?

There are billions upon billions of stars in our galaxy but only about 2000 of those are visible to us at night. Although there is one star that we are able to see during the day, but only because it is the closest one to earth, this star is the sun. Because the brightness of the sun is so vast we cannot see other stars, but when the sun sets we can see an abundance of celestial objects. The sun appears to be what some would call “the largest star” but it is only an average sized star, there are a countless more that are hundreds times the size of our sun. When we look up into the night sky and focus our eyes on what appears to be a star we often notice it twinkling, this is caused by turbulence in earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is like a lens and makes a boiling effect causing stars to look like they’re twinkling. Astronomers have discovered clusters of stars forming patterns, we call them constellations and there are roughly eighty-eight in our night sky. Stars can come in all kinds of different shapes sizes and distances, which causes some stars to appear closer than others. Bigger stars tend to shine more brightly than smaller stars. Even though a star seems bigger and brighter than the others doesn’t actually mean it is, it could just be a star closer to earth than most. The closest star to us is Alpha Centauri and is approximately four light years from earth meaning it takes four years for the light from Alpha Centauri to reach

[27] Scientists can determine what a distant star is made of by looking at ____.

Today we have new technology that allows us to do many incredible things. One of those things is the ability to calculate the stars, where they will go and where

     Stars are a marvelous wonder to many people, that is why some people spend most of their lives wondering what is “above the world so high” (Gardner 98). These people study and map the little twinkling stars in order to get a better meaning of them; they are astronomers. Great astronomers like Edwin Hubble, Immanuel Kant, and William Huggins, never stopped valuing the beauty of the stars. While they developed great astronomical principals. One astronomer who fits this mold most is, Edwin Powell Hubble. Wondering about what was

Johannes Kepler was a German astronomer and mathematician who lived between 1671-1630. Kepler was a Copernican and initially believed that planets should follow perfectly circular orbits (“Johan Kepler” 1). During this time period, Ptolemy’s geocentric theory of the solar system was accepted. Ptolemy’s theory stated that Earth is at the center of the universe and stationary; closest to Earth is the Moon, and beyond it, expanding towards the outside, are Mercury, Venus, and the Sun in a straight line, followed by Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the “fixed stars”. The Ptolemaic system explained the numerous observed motions of the planets as having small spherical orbits called epicycles (“Astronomy” 2). Kepler is best known for introducing three

Planets have mass and therefore have an effect on their stars orbit causing it to wobble. The wobble in the case of a pulsar star is seen as the periodic delay in the arrival of the pulses from the pulsar star (Wolszczan 1994). Due to the nature of a Pulsar star we can detect perturbations in its orbit through its pulses but to detect perturbations in other stars orbits, astronomers use a stars radial velocity.

Indecent bodies like the sun. Stars are made up of big exploding balls of gas, mostly hydrogen and helium. The sun is similarly a star made up of huge amounts of hydrogen, undergoing a continuous nuclear reaction like a hydrogen bomb. Stars come about when vast clouds of hydrogen, helium and dust contract and collapse due to gravity. The clouds came from astronomical plasma from “The Big Bang”, but the dust comes from the supernovae of other stars.

     How does the sun move? It moves just like earth does, it spins on axis like a top. As earth moves around the Milky Way galaxy, the sun revolves around the center of it. It takes one day for the Earth to spin all the way around on the

Ancient astronomers were able to differentiate between stars and planets, as stars remain relatively fixed over the centuries while planets will move an appreciable amount during a comparatively short time.