10 Stellar Star Facts
(by Brigitte Gagne)
1. The Sun is 4.5 billion years old.
2. Given its chemical makeup, astronomers hypothesize that if you could taste the dust from the nebula that gave birth to our sun, it would taste like raspberries.
3. Stars don’t twinkle. Stars appear to twinkle (“scintillate”) especially when they are near the horizon. But in fact, the twinkling is not a property of the stars, but rather of the Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. As the light from a star passes through the atmosphere it must pass through many layers of often rapidly differing density. This has the effect of deflecting the light slightly. The light eventually gets to your eyes, but every deflection causes it to change slightly in color and intensity.
4. There are many, many, many, many, many, many stars in the universe. There are 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is estimated that there are over 500 billion galaxies in the Universe, each of which could have fewer, as many, or more stars as the Milky Way. Multiply those two numbers together and you’ll see that there could be as many as 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe.
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