STARS

The Real Super Stars

• 1. Our sun is but one of a countless number of stars. For much mans history, we believed our sun to be the center of the universe and all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. We soon discovered, however, not only was our sun not the center of the universe, what is though was our universe was not a universe at all but only one of many galaxies. This discovery, that finally gave us a true picture of the structure of the universe, was made be Edwin Hubble.
• 2. Hubble noticed when he looked at some stars they were not sharp and clear like the other stars but they appeared fuzzy. He later discovered the cause of this affect. He was not looking at stars at all, but whole galaxies. These galaxies were so far away all the billions of stars in them looked like only one star from Earth. We finally had a realistic picture of the size of the universe.
• 3. Our sun is a relatively small one compared to the other stars in the universe. Not let me give you a scale the size of our sun. The earth has a diameter of 7900 miles. That is to say the straight-line distance from the North Pole to the South Pole is 7900 miles. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, has a diameter of 88,000 miles. It is 1300 times the size of the earth. I am sure most of you have seen the small red spot, towards the south pole of Jupiter. That small spot is a storm in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. This storm has been raging for over 500 years and it is 3 times the size of the Earth! The Sun is larger still. Our Sun has a diameter of 890,000 miles. This puts its size at about 1.3 million times the size of the Earth. Our Earth is smaller than most of the small dark sunspots that are visible on the surface of the sun.
• 4. But as I have said, our sun is small compared to most other stars. Even in the world of truly massive objects, some stars have words like giant and super giant in their names. Light travels at 186,282 mile per second in vacco. At this speed a light beam could travel around our planet 7.5 times in just one second. Some stars have some much volume, it would take light 30 hours to travel just once around them. These stars are called "inferred giants". Our entire galaxy would fit inside one of these monsters.
• 5. Although these inferred giants have a very large volume, there mass is small buy comparison. A neutron star, which is the smallest of all the stars, only has a diameter of 9 miles but can be much heavier (more massive) than an inferred giant.
• 6. An inferred giant is really the beginning to a stars life. Huge clouds of hydrogen are the birthplace of all stars. Each hydrogen atom has it own gravity. This gravity causes the atoms to clump together. As more and more atoms clump together, there collective gravity becomes greater and greater. Once enough atoms have grouped together, in the way, the same collective gravity that grouped them together, now begins to crush them. As the atoms are crushed, like all other matter, it begins to heat up. The more massive the group to atoms is, the more they are squeezed. When enough when the squeezing or crushing force is large enough, the atoms will fuse together. This is called Nuclear Fusion and it is what powers all stars.
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