Interesting facts about Stars

The stars are huge balls of gas in outer space.  These stars are made from Hydrogen, Helium and other elements.  The star are very much far away from us and the sun is nearest star to us. Hence Sun looks like a huge glowing ball.  Sun has planets revolving round it.  Many stars also have planets revolving around them.  Here are some of the interesting facts about stars.

• There are huge number of stars in this universe. Astronomers guess that there are 1 septillion ( 1 followed by 24 zeroes) stars in this universe.  But you can see around 3,000 stars with your naked eye.
• Like animals and humans, stars also have their own life cycles. Stars pass through many phases and die. Stars explode when they die which is called as supernova. Very small percentage of stars explode.  Some stars end their lives by cooling down to become white dwarfs.
• A Galaxy is nothing but a group of hundreds of billions of stars which are relatively close to each other.
• There are more than 100 billion galaxies and each galaxy has an average of 100 billion stars.
• Stars are of different sizes. Some stars are smaller than our sun while some of very huge that sun is only a small dot when compared to them. Some stars called as super giants have radius of about thousand times that of our sun.  Some stars are very small. These stars are called as neutron stars and has radius of only 6 to 10 kilometers.
• Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the earth.  It is located at 4.2 light years away.  If you travel at speed of light ( 3 lakhs kilometers per second), it will take 50000 years to reach this nearest star.
• The most biggest stars can be as much as 2 billion miles across. If one such massive star were in our solar system, it would cover upto 5 planets including our earth.
• If you look at he Andromeda galaxy ( which is 2.3 million light years away), you are seeing the galaxy as it was 2.3 million years ago.
• The stars with strong gravity become smaller and smaller with time and finally turn into black holes. Black holes have such a great gravity that even light cannot escape from them.
• Hot stars give blue light while cool stars give red light.
• Some of the stars are 6,00,000 times as bright as our sun.
• The stars in out Milky Way Galaxy revolve around the center of the galaxy once in every 200 millions years.