• Question: Roughly how hot are the stars close to earth in our sky and does the energy and heat of a star differentiate depending on how close the star is to the sun

    Asked by Harrysimp710 to Anna on 10 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Scaife

      Anna Scaife answered on 10 Nov 2014:


      Good question. The Sun is our closest star and, as stars go, it’s pretty bog standard. There are millions of other stars in our Galaxy that look really similar to it.

      In astronomy we call most stars that are less than eight times as massive as our Sun “low-mass” stars, because they form and evolve in a reasonably standard way (although how exactly they get planets is something we’re less sure about). Stars that are bigger than that are called “high-mass” stars and they tend to do more exotic things.

      Our Sun has a surface temperature of about 6000 degrees and a core temperature of about ten million degrees! That’s pretty hot. A simple rule of thumb is that the temperature of a star will be bigger if its mass is larger, so stars that are more massive than our Sun will be hotter and vice-versa. Each star sets its own temperature – they don’t really care how close they are to us 🙁

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