Already at the dawn of the existence of mankind, ancient people turned their eyes to the night sky. Astronomers of the first civilizations tried to count the stars, which then seemed to them to be forever fixed points of the vault of heaven. Over time, natural science has developed, ideas about the world and astronomy. However, interest in celestial bodies was only growing.
Amazing stars
In modern times, it was discovered that all these stars, which are smaller than or larger than the Sun, are bodies similar to our luminary. But even after centuries of research, they still have not revealed to mankind all their secrets. In modern astronomy and astrophysics, sensational discoveries are made literally every few years. They suddenly ask scientists amazing puzzles or even change our ideas about the nature of things. Stars that are smaller than the Sun suddenly shine a thousand times brighter than it, for thousands of years the observed points on the vault of the sky turn out to be a whole system of several luminaries and so on. Such a bunch of stars is the Alpha Centauri system closest to us , where three hot bodies rotate around a common center of mass .
The largest star of this Centaurus A system is slightly larger than our native luminary, while the other two stars are smaller than the Sun. In the text below, we take a closer look at some of these amazing objects in our universe.
Stars that are larger than the sun
In our Galaxy, there are many such bodies: giant stars, subgiants, supergiants, hypergiants. So, for example, the masses of blue supergiants can exceed the solar by 10-20 times. This means that in size they can be hundreds of times larger than our luminary and shine a thousand times brighter. Their blue color indicates monstrous temperatures. Such, for example, the stars of Rigel - the brightest body in the constellation Orion. But even these dimensions and luminosity fade in comparison with truly gigantic objects. The largest stars in our universe are the so-called hypergiants. A typical representative of this class will be several times more massive than even the giant Rigel, and 200-250 times more massive than our Sun. However, such objects are quite rare in the universe. Interestingly, their lifespan is quite small by stellar standards. They shine incredibly bright, sometimes eclipsing entire galaxies, but they quickly consume their fuel materials.
Stars smaller than the sun
Small stars live longer, which economically and slowly exhaust their potential. Stars that are smaller than the Sun are generally dimmer. Numerous dwarfs belong to this breed: orange, red, brown, white. By the way, our star is also a yellow dwarf. The Epsilon star in the constellation Eridanus also belongs to the class of yellow dwarfs, but its mass is slightly less than the sun - 85%, and the luminosity is only 28% in comparison with the brightness of our star. The so-called brown dwarfs have amazing properties. Their mass, as a rule, is from 1 to 7% of the solar mass. Thus, in this regard, they even approach planets like our Jupiter. Actually, brown dwarfs cannot be called full-fledged luminaries. Astrophysicists often characterize them as failed stars. Of course, their luminosity and temperature are also hundreds of times less than solar. To date, the coldest brown dwarf known to science has a surface temperature of only 25 degrees C. It is interesting that some stars that are smaller than the Sun, at the same time, may have more mass than it. We are talking about the so-called neutron stars. They are the final products of the evolution of stars. What remains of the star after a supernova flash. The radius of the pulsars (as they are also called differently) is usually compressed to 10-20 kilometers in diameter. A negligible distance comparable to the not-so-largest asteroid. But at the same time, neutron stars are incredibly compacted bodies with a mass equal to 1.5 solar. In total, a handful of substance taken from a body of such an incredible plane will weigh thousands of tons.