The
stars
The sparkling jewels of the night sky have always raised the wonder
and aspirations of mankind. Stars have guided our explorers, have allowed
us to dream and driven us on our quest for higher knowledge.
Stars
are not only very beautiful, they are scientifically truly awe inspiring.
What we can see in the night sky is only a drop in the universal ocean;
a guess at how many stars exist in the Universe is at best, an estimate.
As
astronomers obtain better and better telescopes, small dots of light
turn out to be huge
galaxies or clusters of galaxies, each with millions of their own
stars. In fact, through large telescopes the night sky is a blaze of
light, unlike the sky we see with the naked eye, with a few bright stars
on the dark background of space.
Is it a star or a planet?
Most of the points of light we see in the night
sky are distant stars (although such stars are all within our own galaxy).
Identifying a planet is not always easy, but the nursery rhyme "Twinkle
Twinkle Little Star" can be remembered as a rough guide: planets
"twinkle" far less than stars, or not at all.
Stars
are much farther away from us, and so appear to us as very tiny points
of light. Because of this, their light is affected far more by the turbulence
of our atmosphere than is the sunlight reflected by the planets, which
are closer and cover a greater "area" in the sky. An extreme
example is the Moon, which does not appear to twinkle when viewed with
the unaided eye because atmospheric effects are "averaged out"
by its large apparent size.
What are stars?
Stars are huge balls of plasma - hot ionised gas - undergoing nuclear
fusion reactions involving the combination of small hydrogen nuclei
to form helium and other larger nuclei. In this process, large quantities
of energy are produced in the form of light and heat from the conversion
of matter into energy in the core of the star.
Star classification
Stars are classified using "The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram"
according to their colour and brightness. Our own Sun is classified as
a main sequence G2 Yellow Dwarf star, but there are also Red Giants,
Super Giants, White Dwarfs and even Neutron stars, all members of the
family of stars.
The brightness of the stars: The
magnitude scale
Looking up to the night sky we can see that the stars have a range of
different brightness. The stars were first classed into six brightness
categories, or magnitudes, with the brightest stars being of magnitude
1 and the faintest visible to the eye of magnitude 6. We still use a
similar scheme today, but measure the magnitudes accurately. Some of
the brightest stars actually have negative magnitudes: Sirius, the brightest
star in the night sky, has a magnitude of -1.4. A star of a given magnitude
is a factor of 2.512 times brighter than a star of the next fainter
magnitude, so that five magnitudes correspond exactly to a brightness
difference of a factor of 100 (2.512 to the fifth power). The best telescopes
we have today can detect objects nearly as faint as magnitude 30.
Temperature and colour
We can tell the temperature of a star from its colour. The coolest stars
appear red while blue stars at the other end of the visible spectrum
are the hottest.
The following table gives some examples of stars and their colours.
Star
|
Colour
|
Temp. °C
|
Star
|
Colour
|
Temp. °C
|
Betelgeuse
|
Red
|
2 800
|
Vega
|
White
|
9 700
|
Aldebaran
|
Orange
|
3 600
|
Algol
|
Blue
|
11 700
|
Sun
|
Yellow
|
5 500
|
Beta Centauri
|
Blue
|
28 000
|
|