How can stars help us

If you are anything like me, you like watching the night sky. The stars we see are a lot like our nearest star, the sun. They are just much farther away. That makes stars look like small twinkly things instead of a big, furious thing like our sun. I met up with my friend and astronomer Guy Worthey. Even the smallest stars are pretty big compared to Earth, he said.

These stars are ten times the size, or diameter, of earth. The sun is nearly times larger. And the largest stars, hold on to your hat if you have one, are , times the diameter of earth, Worthey said. It got me wondering what life would be like or if there could be life at all without stars. While some living things exist in dark places on our planet, almost all life as we know it depends on the sun. Plants use energy from sunlight to fuel the process that makes their food.

In this process, they also make the oxygen that we breathe. Create a list of articles to read later. You will be able to access your list from any article in Discover. Stars that go supernova are responsible for creating many of the elements of the periodic table, including those that make up the human body. We think that the universe started 13 or 14 billion years ago, with the Big Bang.

At that point only the lightest elements existed, such as hydrogen, helium and minuscule amounts of lithium. Elements are matter that cannot be broken down into simpler substances. On the periodic table, each element is distinguished by its atomic number, which describes the number of protons in the nuclei of its atoms.

The first generation of stars formed as lumps of gas drew together and eventually began to combust. This would cause a nuclear reaction in the centre of a star. The first stars burned their fuel quickly and were able to make only a few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. When those stars went supernova and expelled the elements they had produced, they seeded the next generation of stars. Scientists can tell the temperature and age of stars from their colour.

Hotter stars burn blue, while cooler and older stars burn red. The next generation of seeded stars were then able to produce other, heavier kinds of elements such as carbon, magnesium and nearly every element in the periodic table. Any element in your body that is heavier than iron has travelled through at least one supernova. The burning that takes place inside stars draws on a huge amount of fuel and creates an enormous amount of energy.

Meanwhile, the burning inside a star creates energy which counteracts the squeeze of gravity which is why our sun is stable. About 2, massive stars in the centre of 30 Doradus produce intense radiation and powerful 'winds' of ejected material.

X-rays are shown in blue, produced by superheated gases, resulting from supernova explosions and stellar winds. The multimillion-degree gas carves out giant bubbles in surrounding cooler gas and dust. When stars die and lose their mass, all the elements that had been generated inside are swept out into space.

Then the next generation of stars form from those elements, burn and are again swept out. Epic floods leave South Sudanese to face disease and starvation. Travel 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever These digital innovations will make your next trip safer and more efficient.

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