Is the sun a normal star?

Question

Compared to other stars

Answer 1

yup...nothing really spectacular about the sun...its a relatively new star, so it has more metals than older stars...but so do many other stars out there...its not the birghtest or the biggest...just a normal, every day type star that happens to be the center of our solar system and the basic reason we are alive

Answer 2

The Sun is a normal star in many respects.

It's a medium-sized (G-type) main sequence star, about half-way through it's expected lifetime of 10 Billion years.

Main sequence, i.e. Hydrogen-Helium core fusion stars make up 90%+ of all stars

Some answerers called it 'young' which is misleading. It is certainly not young relative it's own lifetime, it's middle-aged. It is not even young in galactic terms - being slightly below average in mass (and diameter), half of it's life is still much longer than the entire lifetime of massive stars, which 'burn' faster and die quicker.

Yes it is a Population I star.. i.e. it has a lot of trace elements called 'metals' (in astronomy a metal is any element other than H and He!) which means it was formed from the remains of a supernova, so it is fairly young compared with the age of the universe, (through we are not talking about the kind of 'young' timescale that applied to human life compared with the age of the planet!!).

The Sun IS unusual in some respects though - for example it is a solitary star, while most stars are binaries or multiples!

Answer 3

The Sun is a normal, middle-aged star for its size. The most numerous type of star, M dwarfs, are 10 times smaller and much more common. The biggest, rarest and most spectaulcular stars are 10 to 50 times bigger.

Answer 4

Planetary systems, such as our own solar system, are thought to form together with their parent stars (in our case, the Sun) from clouds of matter that collapse under the pull of their own gravity. The first stars, which formed from primordial hydrogen and helium produced in the big bang at the origin of the universe, cannot have had any planets, because there were no heavy elements available from which they could be built up. Planetary systems are all second-generation (or later) systems, made from the debris of previous generations of stars in which heavy elements have been built up by nucleosynthesis and scattered through space in stellar explosions.

Answer 5

--VERY RARE:


*** g81 2/22 p. 8 Is There Intelligent Life Out There? ***


MAN’S search for intelligent life in outer space has, in a sense, grown up, become an adult. It has been going on in a concentrated way for some 21 years now.

For example, in April 1960 the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia first pointed its cone-shaped ear toward the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani to see if radio communications from them could be heard. In 1968, Soviet astronomers scanned 12 nearby stars similar to our sun. Actually, over 1,000 individual stars have already been examined. And the search is continuing with the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and many others elsewhere.

The search for life in space has proceeded on a different front through numerous rockets launched to the moon and to planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Mars.

What have been the results so far and what indications are there for the future? Is there a basis for your expecting to wake up some morning and hear a news announcement to the effect that intelligent beings on another planet have definitely been contacted? Or has the search for life in space provided reason to believe that we on earth are unique, that there is no intelligent life out there?.......

.......David Black of NASA’s Ames Research Center said that “there was still no unequivocal evidence for any planet beyond the solar system to which the Earth belongs.” And Dr. Iosif Shklovsky, a Soviet astronomer and corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, reached a similar conclusion, though having previously been enthused about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. By 1978 he explained: “It looks as though OUR SUN (my caps), that strange and solitary star surrounded by a family of planets, is most likely a rare exception in the stellar world.”

Answer 6

technically the sun is larger than average, since the vast majority of stars out there are tiny red dwarfs. the sun is big in comparison but smaller than the giant stars.

Answer 7

Yes...in fact the normality of our star helps us to understand how a star "works"...

Answer 8

yes...
there r a few main types of stars(
(A) BLUE WHITE STAR
(B) WHITE STAR
(C) BLUE STAR
(D) ORANGE STAR
(E) YELLOW STAR -- sun
(F) RED STAR

YELLOW STARS are neither too hot or too cold so there is nothing special about it PRESENTLY 'cos as the sun gets very old it will bulge into a humongous red star then either explode (supernova) or shring into a tiny dwarf star.

Answer 9

Yep...just your normal, run-of-the-mill, main sequence star.

Answer 10

yeah nothing special it's lager but not like HUGE and it's not to old it's actually pretty young for a star...