Ask Me Everything

Living together

* Stars are born together in clusters from the same cloud of materiał and at the same time.

*Over hundreds of miUions of years, the stars in a cluster drift apart, but many continue to live alongside another star.

y Of the 100 nearest stellar Wsystems (orbiting stars), 69 are single stars, 22 are madę of two stars, seven are three stars, one is a group of four, and one a group of five.

Largest

constellations

The constellations come in different sizes. The five biggest are:

★    Hydra, the water snake

★    Virgo, the virgin

★    Ursa Major, the great bear

★    Cetus, the sea monster

★    Hercules

WEIRD OR WHAT?

Stars are madę of gas, the density of which varies throughout the star. Most of the gas, which is mainly hydrogen and helium, is squashed in its core. At the Sun’s core, the gas density is around 160 times that of water.

Star patterns

*Astronomers use a system of constellations to find their way among the nighttime stars.

#A constellation is a straight-edged area of sky that includes a made-up pattern. The pattern is formed by linking the bright stars with imaginary lines.

*The star patterns are of

humans, creatures, or objects. The first of these were identified around 4,000 years ago.

*There are 88 constellations—they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to make the complete sky.

Tell me morę: Orion, the hunter

Orion is one of 12 mythological figures in the sky and one of the easiest star patterns to see. It includes the supergiant stars Rigel and Betelgeuse and the star-forming region of the Orion Nebula.

Betelgeuse

RECORD BREAKER

The hottest stars are blue supergiants, like Eta Carinae, which is 180 times bigger than the Sun, 100 times morę massive, and has a surface temperaturę of around 72,032°F (40,000°C).

8

The average distance in light-years between stars in the vicinity of the Sun

8.50

The number of minutes and seconds it takes for the Sun’s light to reach Earth

28

The number of objects depicted in constellations: it includes Crux (the cross), the smallest constellation of all with only four stars

109

The number of Earths that could fit across the face of the Sun

1,000

The largest stars are 1,000 times wider than the Sun; the smallest are around one-hundredth the Sun’s width

8,700 miles

(14,000 km) The width of a white dwarf star, which is what the Sun will be in around five billion years

- *

Orion Nebula

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