Stars Around Us

Stars are all around us every night. We spend hours staring at the sparkly orbs that consume the skies. Yet, we don’t know that they are more than just white dots in the skies; they have a variety of names and types. Some of these types are T Tauri Stars, Main Sequence stars, Red Giant stars.

The first of many stars, is the T Tauri star. Its kind of like the building block of many stars. This type of star is named after the prototype, T Tauri. The nearest T Tauri star to Earth is in Taurus, which is about 400 light years away. This star is estimated to be around ten million years old, then at around that time the star dissipates. The first time T Tauri stars were discovered was in October 1852, by a noted asteroid hunter John Russel Hind. He stumbled upon it when he was looking through the sky, and noted that there was a tenth magnum star that wasn’t on his chart.

In addition, the Main Sequence star is one kind of many different stars in space. Its considered the main type of star, because 90 percent of the stars in the solar system are main sequence stars. Some examples of a main sequence star is the Sun and Sirus. Sirus is actually the brightest star in the nighttime sky. Main sequence stars have lives of about 20 million years, but it depends on the density of the star. They can range from tenth the mass of the Sun to 200 times bigger.

Lastly, the red giant stars are a star type as well. Red giant stars are the last phase in the stellar evolution, meaning that the star is dying. It gets its coloration from the temperature which is cooler than main sequence stars which are white or blue. Red giants are generally about 5 billion years old… that’s older than the Earth which is about 4.5 billion years old. These red giants can be between 100 to 1,000 times the size the sun.

Stars are all around us; their more than just the sparkly orbs in the skies. They illumante our sky each night with an unreachable glow. The stars come in many different groups, some including T Tauri, main sequence, and red giant stars. Stars are spectacular things of nature, more than just things in the night sky.