Top 20 Amazing Facts About Stars | Amazing Facts 4U
- An amazing fact is the total number of stars in the universe is about 10 billion trillion which are 10 followed by 21 zeros. That’s more stars than the number of grains of sand on the Earth.
- The Sun is the closest star. Amazingly when the Sun runs out of fuel in 7 billion years, it will become a red giant, bloating up many times its current size. As it expands, the Sun will consume Mercury, Venus, and probably even Earth.
- Amazingly every single star has almost the exact same chemical composition. All-stars start out with 3/4 hydrogen and 1/4 helium, with other trace elements during the big bang. Over time, stars convert some of their hydrogens into helium. That’s why our Sun’s ratio is more like 70% hydrogen and 29% helium.
- It’s amazing that every little star you see in the night sky is bigger and brighter than our sun.
- A person with very good eyesight may be able to see not more than 2500 stars at any one time.
- You can see stars from the bottom of a well even in daylight.
- Many stars you look at in the night sky seem like a single, distant glimmer of light. However many have binary star systems. They are so far away that they just appear as one speck of light.
- The color of stars can range from red to white to blue. Red is the coolest color; that’s a star with less than 3,500 Centigrade. Stars like our Sun are yellowish-white and average around 6,000 Centigrade. The hottest stars are blue, which corresponds to surface temperatures above 12,000 Centigrade. So the temperature and color of a star are connected.
- The twinkling is not a property of the stars, but of Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. As the light from a star passes through the atmosphere, especially when the star appears near the horizon, it must pass through many layers of often rapidly differing density. This has the effect of deflecting the light slightly. The result is “twinkling.” Above the Earth’s atmosphere, stars do not twinkle.
- When you look at stars you are literally look back in time. This is because the light from the star takes thousands to millions of years to reach the Earth. When you look at any star, you are actually looking back that much in time.
- The amazing fact is that the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We’re all made of stardust.
- The neutron star has such density that a teaspoonful of its matter weighs amazing 110 million tons which is more than all the people on the earth. They are extremely easy to recognize for astronomers to spot through telescopes because they bend the light around them, which allows them to be seen easily through infrared telescopes.
- The largest known star Canis Majoris is so big that if our Sun were a ball 117 cm (46 in) wide, Canis Majoris would be amazing 2.25 kilometers (1.3 miles) wide.
- A car traveling at 60 miles per hour would take over 48 million years to reach the nearest star other than the sun, Proxima Centauri. This is about 685,000 average human lifetimes.
- It’s amazing that the heart of the star reaches 16 billion Centigrade. The grain of sand this hot would kill a person 150 km away.
- It’s amazing that a Red Giant (a kind of exploded star) has a lower density than any vacuum here on earth.
- The Pistol Star is the most luminous star known, amazingly 10 million times the power of the Sun and as big as the size of Earth’s entire orbit around the Sun.
- The fact is that Betelgeuse, a massive star that is incredibly close to us, about 450 light-years away will soon become a supernova and outshine the moon at night!
- The constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, contains the biggest star in the known universe, a hypergiant that is almost a million times as big as the sun.
- The fastest spinning objects in the Universe are neutron stars. Amazingly these can rotate 500 times in just 1 second.
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