Facts about solar system

1. Every star you see in the night sky is bigger and brighter than our sun. Of the 5,000 or
so stars brighter than magnitude 6, only a handful of very faint stars are approximately the same
size and brightness of our sun and the rest are all bigger and brighter. Of the 500 or so that are
brighter than 4th magnitude (which includes essentially every star visible to the unaided eye from
a urban location), all are intrinsically bigger and brighter than our sun, many by a large
percentage. Of the brightest 50 stars visible to the human eye from Earth, the least intrinsically
bright is Alpha Centauri, which is still more than 1.5 times more luminous than our sun, and
cannot be easily seen from most of the Northern Hemisphere.
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2. You cant see millions of stars on a dark night. Despite what you may hear in TV
commercials, poems and songs, you cannot see a million stars anywhere. There simply are not
enough close enough and bright enough. On a really exceptional night, with no Moon and far from
any source of lights, a person with very good eyesight may be able to see 2000-2500 stars at any
one time. (Counting even this small number still would be difficult.). So the next time you hear
someone claim to have seen a million stars in the sky, just appreciate it as artistic license or
exuberant exaggeration because it isnt true!
3. Red hot and cool ice blue NOT! We are accustomed to referring to things that are red as
hot and those that are blue as cool. This is not entirely unreasonable, since a red, glowing fireplace
poker is hot and ice, especially in glaciers and polar regions, can have a bluish cast. But we say
that only because our everyday experience is limited. In fact, heated objects change color as their
temperature changes, and red represents the lowest temperature at which a heated object can
glow in visible light. As it gets hotter, the color changes to white and ultimately to blue. So the red
stars you see in the sky are the coolest (least hot), and the blue stars are the hottest!
4. Stars are black bodies. A black body is an object that absorbs 100 percent of all
electromagnetic radiation (that is, light, radio waves and so on) that falls on it. A common image
here is that of a brick oven with the interior painted black and the only opening a small window. All
light that shines through the window is absorbed by the interior of the oven and none is reflected
outside the oven. It is a perfect absorber. As it turns out, this definition of being perfect absorbers
suits stars very well! However, this just says that a blackbody absorbs all the radiant energy that
hits it, but does not forbid it from re-emitting the energy. In the case of a star, it absorbs all
radiation that falls on it, but it also radiates back into space much more than it absorbs. Thus a
star is a black body that glows with great brilliance! (An even more perfect black body is a black
hole, but of course, it appears truly black, and radiates no light.)
5. There are no green stars. Although there are scattered claims for stars that appear green,
including Beta Librae (Zuben Eschamali), most observers do not see green in any stars except as
an optical effect from their telescopes, or else an idiosyncratic quirk of personal vision and
contrast. Stars emit a spectrum (rainbow) of colors, including green, but the human eye-brain
connection mixes the colors together in a manner that rarely if ever comes out green. One color
can dominate the radiation, but within the range of wavelengths and intensities found in stars,
greens get mixed with other colors, and the star appears white. For stars, the general colors are,
from lower to higher temperatures, red, orange, yellow, white and blue. So as far as the human
eye can tell, there are no green stars.

6. Our sun is a green star. That being said, the sun is a green star, or more specifically, a
green-blue star, whose peak wavelength lies clearly in the transition area on the spectrum between
blue and green. This is not just an idle fact, but is important because the temperature of a star is
related to the color of its most predominate wavelength of emission. (Whew!) In the suns case,
the surface temperature is about 5,800 K, or 500 nanometers, a green-blue. However, as indicated
above, when the human eye factors in the other colors around it, the suns apparent color comes
out a white or even a yellowish white.
7. Our sun is a dwarf star. We are accustomed to think of the sun as a normal star, and in
many respects, it is. But did you know that it is a dwarf star? You may have heard of a white
dwarf, but that is not a regular star at all, but the corpse of a dead star. Technically, as far as
normal stars go (that is, astronomical objects that produce their own energy through sustained
and stable hydrogen fusion), there are only dwarfs, giants and supergiants. The giants and
supergiants represent the terminal (old age) stages of stars, but the vast majority of stars, those
in the long, mature stage of evolution (Main Sequence) are all called dwarfs. There is quite a bit
of range in size here, but they are all much smaller than the giants and supergiants. So
technically, the sun is a dwarf star, sometimes called Yellow Dwarf in contradiction to the entry
above!
8. Stars dont twinkle. Stars appear to twinkle (scintillate), especially when they are near the
horizon. One star, Sirius, twinkles, sparkles and flashes so much some times that people actually
report it as a UFO. But in fact, the twinkling is not a property of the stars, but of Earths turbulent
atmosphere. As the light from a star passes through the atmosphere, especially when the star
appears near the horizon, it must pass through many layers of often rapidly differing density. This
has the effect of deflecting the light slightly as it were a ball in a pinball machine. The light
eventually gets to your eyes, but every deflection causes it to change slightly in color and
intensity. The result is twinkling. Above the Earths atmosphere, stars do not twinkle.
9. You can see 20 quadrillion miles, at least. On a good night, you can see about
19,000,000,000,000,000 miles, easily. Thats 19 quadrillion miles, the approximate distance to the
bright star Deneb in Cygnus. which is prominent in the evening skies of Fall and Winter. Deneb is
bright enough to be seen virtually anywhere in the Northern hemisphere, and in fact from almost
anywhere in the inhabited world. There is another star, Eta Carina, that is a little more than twice
as far away, or about 44 quadrillion miles. But Eta Carina is faint, and not well placed for observers
in most of the Northern hemisphere. Those are stars, but both the Andromeda Galaxy and the
Triangulum Galaxy are also visible under certain conditions, and are roughly 15 and 18 quintillion
miles away! (One quintillion is 10^18!)
10. Black holes dont suck. Many writers frequently describe black holes as sucking in
everything around them. And it is a common worry among the ill-informed that the so-far
hypothetical mini black holes that may be produced by the Large Hadron Collider would suck in
everything around them in an ever increasing vortex that would consume the Earth! Say it aint
so, Joe! Well, I am not Shoeless Joe Jackson, but it aint so. In the case of the LHC, it isnt true
for a number of reasons, but black holes in general do not suck.
This not just a semantic distinction, but one of process and consequence as well. The word suck
via suction, as in the way vacuum cleaners work, is not how black holes attract matter. In a
vacuum cleaner, the fan produces a partial vacuum (really, just a slightly lower pressure) at the
floor end of the vacuum, and regular air pressure outside, being greater, pushes the air into it,
carrying along loose dirt and dust.

In the case of black holes, there is no suction involved. Instead, matter is pulled into the black
hole by a very strong gravitational attraction. In one way of visualizing it, it really is a bit like
falling into a hole, but not like being hoovered into it. Gravity is a fundamental force of Nature, and
all matter has it. When something is pulled into a black hole, the process is more like being pulled
into like a fish being reeled in by an angler, rather than being pushed along like a rafter inexorably
being dragged over a waterfall.
The difference may seem trivial, but from a physical standpoint it is fundamental.
So black holes dont suck, but they are very cool. Actually, they are cold. Very, very cold. But
thats a story for another time.

1) There are an unfathomable number

of stars in the observable universe.
So you know when youre in a rural area at night and the moon isnt visible and you
can see a ton of stars?
In those optimal circumstances, youre looking at around 2,500 stars at most. Thats
about 1/100,000,000th of the total stars just in our own galaxy.
Speaking of which, take another look above at our gorgeous Milky Way. To help
understand just how insanely big it is, here are a few facts:
The diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years. A light year is the distance
light travels in a year. Considering light can travel around the Earth seven times in
a second, a light year is a mind-bogglingly large distance. It would take our fastest
spacecraft 18,000 years to travel one light year. And with the Milky Way, were talking
about 100,000 of them.

That also means that if you use a telescope to see a star on the far side of the
galaxy, youre actually seeing what the star looked like 100,000 years ago, since the
light that left the star then is just reaching us now. Likewise, if at this moment,

someone on the other side of the galaxy is checking out the Earth with a telescope,
theyll see a bunch of early humans and Neanderthals running around clubbing each
other like fools.
You might think that when you look closely at that above picture of the Milky Way,
one of those little dots might be our sun. In fact, if you expanded the above photo to
be the size of the Earth, youd still need a microscope to be able to see our pinprick
of a sunif the Milky Way were the size of the Earth, the sun would be about 1/50th
of a millimeter in diameter.
Massive. And all in all, the Milky Way contains between 100 and 400 billion stars.
And thats just one galaxy.

In 1995, scientists picked out a little section of the night

sky that was unusually devoid of stars. To the naked eye, and even in a normal
telescope, this region looked empty and black. And the section was tinyit covered
the same amount of sky that a tennis ball would cover if it were 100 meters above
you (and the image on the right shows the size of the region in comparison to the
size of the moon in the sky at night).
The scientists used the Hubble Telescope to take a 10-day long exposure of the
empty region to find out what was out there deep in the blackness. They came back
with this:

Astonishing.
To be clear, nothing in this photo is a star. Each thing you seeeven the faintest little
dotis an entiregalaxy. There are over 10,000 in this image, each one containing
around 100 billion stars. And again, this is all in a pinpoint little square of the night
sky.
Scientists used the info from this photo to postulate that the observable universe
contains over 100 billion galaxies, which puts the total stars in the observable
universe at somewhere between 10^22 and 10^24, or around 100 sextillion stars.
To put that in perspective, people at the University of Hawaii spent an unreasonable
amount of timecalculating an estimate for the number of grains of sand in the world
7.5 quintillion or 7.5 x 10^18.
That means that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are about 10,000 stars
in the universe.

Silliness.

2) Stars are not close to one another.

Binary star systems aside, most stars are sitting there

with no one around for huge distances in any direction, completely bored.
Our sun is no exceptionthe closest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years
away, or 70,000 years away in our fastest spacecraft.
So if the sun were a 4cm-diameter ping pong ball in New York, the closest star is
another ping pong ball 1,153km (743mi) away in Atlanta.