What is a star?

They’re not simply the wonderful, romantic and dramatic back drop to the nigh sky that many of us see them as. To see a shooting star is clearly a wondorous thing but the true fast of ‘what a star’ actually is- might be even more staggering than even this.

Stars are hot balls of gases which burn for millions of years. They’re formed in “stellar nurseries” when gases and dust molecules are attracted together by gravitational force. The heat energy rendered by stars is what makes them glisten, glitter and shine. Their temperatures reach hundreds of thousands degree Centigrade. This causes them to twinkle. wink and sparkle!
Stars have different characteristics. The colour, or spectral type, of a star – ranging from blue to white to yellow to red – can give us an indication of the stars age. Our closest star, The Sun, is bright glowing yellow, and has shone for some 5,000, 1000000 years, and is approximately midway through its life cycle. The Sun is ninety-three million miles away. The next closest star to us is in the Centaurus constellation and it’s forty-five 1000000 million miles away. To put it in linear perspective, if you imagine the earth’s proportional distance from the Sun as the length of three feet – the next nearest star is virtually as far the Moon – approximately 239,000 miles away. Distances in outer space are so extraordinary that astronomers use light years as a criterion instead of ordinary miles or kilometers. One light year is the distance light travels in twelve months, which is about six million 1000000 miles.

So next time that you ‘Wish Upon a Star’, don’t forget just how utterly amazing they actually are!