In the sky, there are so many stars you can’t possibly see them all—not even with a telescope. So how do we remember which stars make up which constellation? Some constellations, like Ursa Major, are easy to spot because they form recognizable shapes—the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper, respectively. […]

All you need to know about our Nearest Star System Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our Star Sun. It is about 4.37 light-years away from us. Alpha Centauri (known as Proxima Centauri) is a three-star system named Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Alpha Centauri C. […]

The Sun is a massive ball of incandescent gas. It is a star and the nearest to Earth. The mass of the Sun is 1,989 times that of Earth. The volume is 1,300,000 times greater than that of Earth. About 30% of its group is hydrogen, 70% helium, and other […]

Neutrinos are tiny, neutral particles that are created in the big bang. They’re so small they can pass through a light-year of lead without interacting with any matter. They come from the Sun and other nuclear reactions and radioactive decay. To study neutrinos, scientists use large particle detectors buried deep […]

The Sun is a giant star. It’s the biggest of all the stars. It has a diameter of 1,392,684 km (865,374 miles). To give you an idea of how big that is: if the Sun was hollow and you could shrink the Earth down to a single grain of sand, […]

The Sun is a ball of hot gasses present in the solar system, and it is also one of the largest celestial bodies. It is a perfect sphere of hot gasses with an internal convective movement that generates a magnetic field through a dynamo method. It is an almost perfect […]

A star’s mass determines its color and lifetime. Blue giants are massive stars, much more massive than the Sun, but they don’t burn as long as red dwarfs. This shade of blue is slightly different from what you see in the sky every night. The celestial kind is produced by […]

Red giants are stars that have exhausted their core hydrogen and helium and expanded to millions of miles wide. They burn heavier elements in their cores, resulting in a giant star with a swollen atmosphere. In the final stage of its stellar evolution, a red giant is a large, glowing […]

The Solar Neutrino Problem, an In-Depth Look The solar neutrino problem, also known as the Daytime Sky Effect or the Disappearing Sun Paradox, was an experimental discovery made in 1987. Physicists monitoring a nuclear reactor at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France, found that fewer solar neutrinos had arrived than […]

Betelgeuse usually is the 10th most splendid star in the night sky and, after Rigel, the second-most brilliant in the heavenly body of Orion. It is a particularly rosy semiregular variable star whose evident extent, changing somewhere in the range of +0.0 and +1.6, has the most extensive reach shown […]