fundamentals: the stars
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Stellar Evolution Demystified
Whaddya know…after what seems like a geological age, we’re finally done with stellar evolution! And we’ve covered a truly ridiculous amount of information. We’ve covered a star’s relatively gentle, humble beginnings within the collapsing cores of giant molecular clouds (or…
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The Average Star
What the heck is the average star like? We’ve talked about a lot of stars over the past few weeks. We’ve discovered the vast distances between the stars, looked more closely at what really makes a star bright, and covered all…
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Binary Stars
We know how big stars are; they range from the size of the Earth to over a thousand times the size of the sun (which is in itself over one hundred times the size of the Earth). We know they’re…
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Star Types Demystified
By now, I’ve introduced you to a lot of different ways to classify stars. Months ago, I talked about the different spectral classes — O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. Even before that, I told you about apparent visual…
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Just How Big Are Stars?
Tell me about the stars you see in this image. They look like billions of little pinpricks of light, right? It’s hard to imagine that each one of these is probably the size of the sun…or much larger. And the…
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The H-R Diagram
There are 250 billion stars in our galaxy alone. Many are much like the sun, labeled with the Latin sol for “sun” in this diagram. But many more are not quite what we might expect stars to be like, after living…
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Distances Between Stars
When you look up into the sky on a clear night away from the glare of the city, you see trillions upon trillions of stars. Thousands of years ago, the classical astronomers saw the same thing you do today — except…
