Q About Stars

[markcollier8 (Mark)]

Does anybody really know what Stars are or is everybody guessing someone once told me they were Suns like ours & they all had a Galaxy around a trillion Suns tell me it ain't so theres gotta be a more reasonable explaination??

[renormalised (Carl)]

Nope...that's the answer. They're all basically huge balls of hot plasma with a thermonuclear reactor in their cores. Just like the Sun.

[Dennis]

Simplistically put:

• Moons orbit Planets, (like the Moon orbits the Earth, Phobos & Deimos orbit Mars, etc.)
• Planets orbit Stars, (like Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc orbit the Sun.)
• Stars exist in Galaxies, (like our Sun in the Milky Way.)
• Galaxies exist in groups and clusters (like our Milky Way in the Local Group).
• Galaxy Clusters exist throughout the Universe.

Last time I checked, our Galaxy had approximately 100 billion (100,000,000,000) stars and there are between 125 and 500 billion galaxies in the Universe.

Cheers

Dennis

[renormalised (Carl)]

100 Billion stars is an old, out of date number....the current widely accepted figure is 400 Billion. Though, some recent estimates put the numbers of stars in the Galaxy at 795-800 Billion and the most recent estimate of the Galaxy's mass is about 3 Trillion solar masses.

[KenGee (Kenith Gee)]

We known that stars are like our sun for lots of reasons the two best are...
When we look at the light from the sun (it's spectra) we can tell what it is made of, when we look at start's light we see they are made of the same thing. We can also image other suns with scopes like hubble.