What exactly is a star?

Question

are all stars comparable to our sun?
are stars another name for suns?

Answer 1

Our sun is a star. It's a huge mass of gas of sufficient density to convert hydrogen to helium by nuclear fusion. Our sun is fairly rare by being a single star. The majoritory of stars are either binary (2) or exist in clusters. They vary in size from white dwarfs to red giants.

Answer 2

A star is a ball of gas that is constricted in a gravity field so that it forms that ball shape. Scientists usually compare the stars they find to our sun, since that is the size we are used to, so if someone says: "a star is found 100 times the size of the sun", people can get a picture in their mind exactly how big this thing is. It's better then saying, 1000 km in diameter--it's hard to get a picture on mind the size of that star. Yes, stars are another names for suns. The sun is a star and a star is the sun. It works both ways.

Answer 3

A star is a cosmic object that is bigger than a planet and usually emits light and heat. Based on this property stars can be red, yellow or blue. The blue type is the hottest. Our sun is a yellow star, so it is of medium power. The difference between a star and a sun is based on the relation with the planets. A star may be considered a sun in relation with the planets that revolve around it. A part of stars are suns.
Stars are important for observing the expansion of the universe, for studying their orbits (orbits can show the presence of other objects) and the composition of nearby planets.
Dying stars become red giants or brown or white dwarfs or even black holes.(this happens when gravity becomes stronger than the force of nuclear reactions taking place in the star).
See also quasar,pulsar,nebula,orbit,Kepler's formula for orbits,satellites,

Answer 4

This was taken from the second weblink below and the site is full of just about everything you could need to know about the nature of stars: 'The stars surround you. At night they are everywhere, dotting the sky; in the daytime, one, our Sun, dominates, its brilliant light washing the others away until twilight yields to darkness. They are the givers of light and life. "To know ourselves, we must know the stars." ...........A star is a body that at some time in its life generates its light and heat by nuclear reactions, specifically by the fusion of hydrogen into helium under conditions of enormous temperature and density. When hydrogen atoms merge to create the next heavier element, helium, mass is lost, the mass (M) converted to energy (E) through Einstein's famous equation E = mc squared, where "c" is the speed of light. The Sun is powered by hydrogen fusion, as are many of the other stars you see at night......... The temperature at the center of the Sun is 15.6 million degrees Kelvin (K = centigrade degrees above absolute zero, -273 C), and the density is 14 times that of lead. ....... Even under these extreme conditions, the Sun is still a gas throughout.' The next is a quote from the first weblink: 'Our Sun is a normal main-sequence G2 star, one of more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy. It is often said that the Sun is an "ordinary" star. That's true in the sense that there are many others similar to it. But there are many more smaller stars than larger ones; the Sun is in the top 10% by mass. The median size of stars in our galaxy is probably less than half the mass of the Sun.' Hope you find these sites helpful.

Answer 5

It's like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. But there it was in the observations -- a star enshrouded by the dustiest environment any astronomer had ever seen so close to a Sun-like star long after its formation, with a strong infrared 'signature' that revealed the dust is warm, indicating that collisions of asteroids, or planetesimals, or even planetary-sized objects have recently taken place -- and hinting that a young Earth could be in the making there. For years, astronomers have patiently studied hundreds of thousands of stars in the hopes of finding one like BD +20 307 with a strong warm dust signature at Earth-to-Sun distances from the star. "We were lucky," said Inseok Song, the Gemini Observatory astronomer who led the U.S.-based research team that reported its findings in today's issue of the British science journal Nature.
"Historically, there have been many dusty stars known among astronomers, and those stars have a dust temperature that's very cold, cooler than 100 Kelvin, which corresponds to roughly the orbital separation of Neptune from the Sun, and more or less corresponds to Kuiper Belt objects," Song said in an interview with The Planetary Society yesterday. And "most of the dust that's been investigated by astronomers following up on the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), ESA's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), and now the Spitzer Space Telescope, is much further out, out around the orbit of [where] Neptune [is in our system]," added team member Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and a co-author on the paper.
Hope this will help you, good luck!!!!!!!!

Answer 6

Our sun is a star. According to the band They Might Be Giants, "The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. The sun is hot. The sun is not a place where we could live. But there'd be no life on the planet Earth without the light it gives."

Answer 7

A star is a big ball of gas undergoing nuclear reactions, in most cases the gas is hydrogen but there are other gases and heavy elements there too.

The Sun is the name we have given to the star at the center of our solar system. Other stars have been given names but they are only really significant to astronomers.

Stars come is different types depending on how big and how old they are.

Answer 8

yes there are. There are stars a thousand times bigger than our sun. Our sun is like a dwarf compared to others
And yes, stars are just another name for suns

A star is just a giant ball of hydrogen. Its heat and light is due to nuclear fusion

Answer 9

Yes they are all comparable to the sun, there are some at diffrent stages in the cycle but all stars could be called suns.

Answer 10

Yes, stars are another name for suns. However they vary quite a lot - some are many times the size of our sun, some are much smaller; some are red or blue-ish.