Star

A couple of stars (Art by NASA and ESA)

**Stars**, also called **Luminaries**, are spheres of hot gas and glowing plasma that orbit supermassive black holes, giving rise to large galaxies. Anciently, in myths, the Stars were seen to be literally shining points in the sky, fixed in a solid celestial dome. The star best known to man is the Sun.

## Overview

The number of stars in the universe exceeds sextillions, with some scientists claiming that humanity currently lives in the golden age of stars, inhabiting a universe full of light and probably having a lot of life out there. Stars are usually orbited by asteroids, protoplanets, planetoids (or dwarf planets) and by rocky and gaseous planets, or even other stars.

## Description

Stars are large spheres made of plasma, being practically a nuclear explosion but on multi-planetary scales, being able to destroy entire planetary systems if the stars were not crushed by the force of gravity, preventing them from exploding and remaining in a spherical shape for billions of years. The Sun is a star, and it wouldn't be the only star in the solar system if Jupiter had become a brown dwarf star.

The coolest stars are the red stars, with the hottest stars being the blue stars.

* **Yellow Dwarf Star**: A young star with a remoderated temperature, reaching 5,700 degrees kelvin on the surface and surpassing 1 million degrees kelvin in the core. The star that Earth orbits, the Sun, is a yellow dwarf star.
* **Red Dwarf Star**: A red dwarf star is one of the smallest and coolest stars in the universe, reaching 2,000 degrees kelvin. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the Milky Way, at least in the Solar neighborhood.
* **Red Giant Star**: A red giant is a luminous giant star of low or intermediate mass in a late phase of stellar evolution. The sun, the central star of Earth's solar system, will eventually become a red giant star.
* **Red Hypergiant Star**: Red hypergiant stars are the biggest stars in the universe, like VY Canis Majoris, which is so big that a billion suns could fit inside it.
* **Blue Giant Star**: A blue giant star is a star as big as red giants, but extremely hot. These stars can be up to 10,000 degrees Kelvin in temperature.
* **Blue Supergiant Star**: Blue supergiants are stars even more massive than blue giants, but with temperatures as great as 50,000 degrees Kelvin.
* **Brown Dwarf Star**: A brown dwarf or failed stars is a star whose size is between that of giant planets like Jupiter and that of small stars, not being big enough to start the fusion of hydrogen in its core and becoming massive stars like the sun.
* **Black Dwarf Star**: Black dwarf stars are a type of star that is what will remain of every star in the universe after quadrillions of years. Black dwarf stars are as small or even smaller than Earth. They have no light and are practically rock. A corpse of what was once a shining star.
* **White Dwarf Star**: A white dwarf star is when a red giant star explodes, with only its core surviving the explosion. A white dwarf star is the size of Earth or slightly larger, but is super bright.
* **Iron Star**: Stars are extremely rare stars, being so rare that one should only appear once every 10^1500 years. As the number suggests, these are stars whose cores are made of iron, the same iron in your frying pan.
* **Antimatter Star**: Antimatter stars are stars made of negative matter. They can have the same properties as ordinary matter stars. If two stars, one of matter and one of antimatter, collided, it would cause one of the biggest explosions ever seen.
* **Blue Dwarf Star**: A blue dwarf star is a predicted class of star that develops from a red dwarf after exhausting much of its hydrogen supply.
* **Dark-energy Star**: Stars made of dark energy, the same energy that drives galaxies apart. These stars, because they are made of unobservable energy by absorbing light, can be mistaken for black holes.
* **Quasi Star**: Quasi Stars are stars that were born in the very early days of the universe, probably a few moments or millions of years after the Big Bang, having existed for an extremely short period of time before exploding. These stars would have existed for so little time because they are so big and heavy, being crushed by gravity, resulting in the birth of the great Black Holes that are the epicenters of galaxies. These stars before they explode would have more than one hundred billion kilometers in diameter, being so big that they could swallow all eight planets of the solar system and the sun itself.
* **Boson Star**: A boson star is an astronomical object made up of particles called bosons (ordinary stars are composed of fermions).
* **Black Hole**: A black hole is an extremely massive star that has been crushed by its own weight to the point of becoming a hyperheavy gravitational singularity.
* **White Hole**: The opposite of a black hole. A white hole is a type of “tunnel” that connects two opposite sides of outer space, like a channel between the two ends. While everything that enters a Black Hole cannot escape, everything outside a White Hole cannot enter.

## History

During the time when the universe was still being created, and still had no fixed physical laws, atomic and subatomic particles began to attract and collide with each other at very fast speeds, repeating this process for billions of years, eventually creating a singularity ultra dense that exploded causing a big "bang" that spurted particles and expanded the cosmos to infinity.

For millions of years, the universe was a cold, dark, empty space. However, the particles gushed out by the great expansion eventually began to merge and collide with each other, thus creating large spheres of light born of nuclear fusion. These spheres began to orbit each other, while others exploded giving life to other stars, which then continued to gravitationally connect, giving rise to large galaxies, filling the previously dark universe with bright points.

And finally, there was light! And that was good.

## Myths and Legends

In Hebrew myths, the stars were interpreted as literally being divine beings of light, that is, angels. The stars were also called the Sons of God. As the Jewish religion began as polytheistic, it is likely that the sun represented the LORD-God, with the moon representing Asherah.

## Trivia

* VY Canis Majoris and UY Scuti are the two stars that are in contention for the ranking of the biggest star in the universe.
* Due to the speed that space expands, eventually the expansion of space will become faster than light itself and the stars and galaxies that exist in the most distant regions of the universe will simply never be seen by humanity because light will never reach the Earth.
	+ Therefore, the only stars that humanity will see (if it still exists) in billions of years will be the stars of Milkydromeda, the galaxy resulting from the Milky Way merger with Andromeda.