Star

space · astronomy · glowing

Our nearest star. The Sun is the closest star to Earth. All the other stars are so far away that they look like tiny fixed points of light at night.

Balls of plasma. A star is a huge glowing sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. Plasma is a super-hot state of matter, even hotter than fire.

Too many to count. The observable universe holds somewhere between 10,000 billion billion and a million billion billion stars, a number almost too big to imagine.

Only a few visible. Even though there are countless stars, only about 4,000 can be seen with the naked eye, and they're all in our own Milky Way galaxy.

Connect the dots. People have grouped the brightest stars into patterns called constellations, and many bright stars even have their own names.