PROPERTIES OF STAR

HOW DO WE CLASSIFY STAR?

 Size
 Temperature and color
 Brightness

TEMPERATURE AND COLOR

 Red – coolest stars

 Blue – hottest stars

ORDER FROM COOLEST TO HOTTEST

 Red, Red-orange, yellow, white, blue

SIZE

 Giants/supergiant – large and very large stars. Many of these are very far away
 White Dwarfs – very small stars – about the size of the earth
 Neutron Stars – even smaller stars – only 20km in diameter
 Medium Size Stars – many stars this size. The size of our sun

Binary star systems contain two stars that orbit around their common center of mass. Many of the stars
in our galaxy are part of a binary system.

 Binary Stars are used to determine the mass of the star.

HOW DO WE MEASURE STARS?

 Parallax – the apparent change in position of an object when you look at it from different places.

SPEED OF LIGHT

Light travels at a speed of:

 186,000 miles a second

 300,000,000 meters per second
 700 million miles an hour.

For scale the distance from the earth to the moon

 239,000 miles

Light year - is the distance light can travel in a year.

-The light year is one of the basic measures of distance for astronomy

-Nothing travels faster than the speed of light

STELLAR BRIGHTNESS = magnitude

 Apparent Brightness – the brightness as seen from earth.

 Absolute Brightness – the amount of light the star actually gives off

VARIABLE STARS

 Cepheid variables – pulsate in a regular way, rapidly increasing in brightness as they increase in
size, then slowly decreasing in brightness as the decrease in size.
 Nova – sudden brightening of a star.

INSTELLAR MATTER

 Between stars there are clouds of dust and gasses = nebulae (Greek for cloud)

PREPARED BY:

JEAH M. APAN
ELLA MAE MAPA
DONNALYN SUPOLMO