Friday Facts on a Sunday (at least it's Sunday some places in the world)

It's getting close to Christmas now, and it's darker than ever (oh, how much I hate that - so happy it'll go the other way around in just 2 days), so I though now is a good time for 10 FACTS about stars:

1) Stars are born when huge clouds of gas start to collide because they are attracted to each other, because of gravity (short fact: stars exist because of gravity :P ) <3

- where stars are born -

2) Stars make electromagnetic radiation (like for example visible light) by fusion of hydrogen into helium.

3) Stars are pretty

4) Our nearest star is actually what we normally call the sun - the sun is a star ;)

5) There are more than 200 billion stars just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way (that's huge!)

- our home in the Universe - the Milky Way <3  -

6) When we look at the night sky, we can only see 5000 of all the stars in the Milky Way :/ (However, 5000 is also quite much, even though it's super small compared 200 billion)

7) All those stars that we see in the sky are bigger than our own sun (there are stars with the same size as our sun, and smaller ones too, but they don't shine bright enough so that we can see them)

8) The things we see in the sky that shines the brightest are actually not stars. We see Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, for example, and they are planets ;)

9) The surface temperature of a star ranges from about 2100 degrees Celsius to 40 000 degrees Celsius (our sun has a surface temperature of about 6000 degrees)

10) Our closest star (besides the sun, of course) is called Alpha Centauri, and it is 4 light years away from us. This means that the light we see from this star today was actually emitted four years ago - we are really looking back in time when we are looking at the stars :) If we "translate" this distance into kilometers, Alpha Centauri is about 40 000 000 000 000 km away from us - this is our neighbour...the Universe is simply enormous!