Before my research I thought stars did twinkle, but they actually don’t! Stars shine a steady light. The reason they appear to be twinkling, is the Earth’s atmosphere and wind slightly bends the starlight. So to us here on Earth, the starlight moves quickly, but it is just our planet’s atmosphere. If we were on the moon or a planet with no atmosphere, the stars would not look like they were twinkling.

Before my research, I thought stars were just hot, giant rocks, with solid ground, so I thought we could stand on one. But humans can only stand on solid ground, and stars are made of hot gases, like hydrogen and helium, so we wouldn’t be able to stand on a star. Another reason why we can’t stand on a star is they are too hot. The middle of a star can reach 1 million degrees Celsius! All the stars are too hot to visit.

If we wanted to land on a star, we would have to travel there. The nearest star (apart from the sun) is called Proxima Centauri, and it is 4.3 light years away! It would take us over 1,000 years to get there! It seems impossible, but scientists say we might be able to visit the stars in the future………

Proxima Centauri

Before I researched this, I thought all stars were yellow, but I was wrong. Stars vary in size and colour. The hotter stars in the solar system are a blue-ish colour. The colder stars are red. Our sun is an average temperature star, so it is an orange/yellow colour. The telescope in space, Hubble, has taken photos of stars, and has sent back some pictures back of clusters of lots of different coloured stars.

Stars are made up of different gases, mostly hydrogen and helium. They are also made of dust grains. When there is too much hydrogen and helium inside a star, the hydrogen and helium turns into heavier types of gas. When a star dies, the excess gas is used in stars that are just forming.

Yes!!!The sun is only average size, there are stars much bigger and much smaller! The sun is big enough to swallow all the planets in the solar system, but some stars are over 150 times BIGGER than that!! Scientists have discovered that on the other side of the galaxy, there are much bigger stars. That is where the biggest star in the galaxy is.So our sun is actually not that big compared to other stars.

The biggest star known to us is called LBV1806-20.(the LBV stands for Luminous Blue Variable star). It is a blue star, so it is very hot. This star is over 5 MILLION times brighter than our sun! It is over 45,000 light years away from Earth, and is at least 150 times bigger than the sun!

This is what LBV1806-20 looks like

I used to think that shooting stars were actually stars falling, but they’re not.They are meteorites. When the meteorites enter the Earth’s atmosphere, they start to burn up, which is why shooting stars have a tail. When and if shooting stars land on the surface of earth, they are very small.

Without a telescope, humans can see about 7,000 stars in the night sky. There are many more in space though! There are too many stars in the sky to count, but a rough estimate is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!!!!!!!We cannot see stars in other galaxies without using powerful telescopes.

Some people think we are polluting space by exploring it, because when space shuttles fly, they have pieces falling of, called stages. These just keep floating around space, colliding with other planets and damaging them. To solve this we could just stop space exploration, OR we could build a new type of shuttle that doesn’t have to have things falling off, so we wouldn’t be polluting space anymore.

Books: Don't know much about the solar system

Question and Answers about the stars

Expert: Some of my information was provided by Laura Whitlock who works at NASA

DVD: All about the stars

Incursion: I got some information from the Back to the Moon incursion.

Websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star

http://library.thinkquest.org

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov

http://nasascience.nasa.gov/astrophysics