Astronomy in general is a huge subject, as vast as the universe it describes. Limiting to star astronomy still leaves a lot of things to cover. There is more than a single person could study in a lifetime just in our own solar system. Many people decide, then, to specialize, to focus their attention on the brightest objects that are often the first space objects that peak people’s interest in astronomy – the stars.
The closest star we know is our sun, about 94,000,000 miles away from Earth. It generates an amazing amount of heat to reach all that distance. Our own sun contains just over 98% of the total mass in the solar system. That’s compared to all the planets, moons, space rocks and other material. If someone wanted to they could fit 105 Earths across the face of the sun, and over 1.3 million earths inside the Sun. The sun’s core has 340 billion times the pressure of the earth and temperatures there reach 27,000,000F. That would burn toast to a crisp instantly.
The sun is the most studied star we know. It’s about 250,000 times closer to Earth than the next known star. Star astronomy gets interesting when you consider all of those stars out there. From the Earth about 5,000 stars, every one in our own Milky Way galaxy, can be seen with the naked eye. With telescopes many more of the over 1 x 10^22 stars in the universe (that’s an estimate) can be seen. By the way, that’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. Even a small amateur telescope brings hundreds of thousands of stars to a person’s view. Wow! Larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain an estimated total of over 200 billion stars. It would take many lifetimes just to count that high.
Scientists now know, through star astronomy, that many stars and planets orbiting them. Stars wobble when planets orbit them, and that wobbling can be measured. For the first time, in 2008, astronomers took images of distant solar systems. We are ever closer to finding intelligent life.
Is an intergalactic war in our near future? That’s doubtful. But star astronomy will keep on going. We might be under observation from one of those distant planets!
