Picture of a star

Stars are very large balls of plasma held together by gravity, stars shine because of something called thermonuclear fusion that happens within it's core.  The core releases energy that travels through the star and shines into outer space.  Stars are made of mostly hydrogen, helium, and other more dense elements.  Stars are created when a gasious cloud made up of the elements I just mentioned begins to colapse and form the core of the star.

When the core becomes dense enough the star starts to burn off the hydrogen and it starts making helium through something called fusion.  The pressure that the hydrogen makes within the core helps the star not to collapse on itself.  Once all the hydrogen has been used up within the star, expand and becomes what is called as a red giant.  The red giant begins to use up the hydrogen crust, or any other element that has formed there. 

Binary or multi-star systems contain stars that have 2 or more stars that are connected due to gravitational pulls.  If they are close enough together they will eventually combine gravitational pulls and creat either a cluster or maybe even a galaxy. 

 This is a Global Cluster or stars, they named this cluster Omega Centauri, and is around 17,000 light years from earth.  It is estimated to have around 10 million stars in this cluster that is in a gravity rotation around a local center of gravity.  It is so dense with stars that telescopes on the planet earths surface cannot distinguish the individual stars and it looks like one big shining star.  It is considered the most luminous and larges star cluster in the Milkey Way.  It is also the only cluster that can be seen without using a telescope.

The closest star to the earth is the sun, it is at  the center of our solar system.  It is approximately 98.6% of our solar systems mass, this includes all the planets, comets, moons, meteoroids, and dust.  The sun is 92,956,000 miles away from the earth, it takes 8 minutes and 19 seconds for the light from the sun to reach the earth, depending on what time of the year it is.

The sun and other stars have been used for hundreds of years for directions while navagating the world on land and water.  Depending where the stars where in the sky can determine what direction you are traveling and what way you need to travel to get somewhere.  They were also very popular in religion in earlier civilations, depending on where the stars were in the sky depended on when they celebrated religeous activities.  In some cultures stars were thought to be the souls of dead gods.  The star Algol, was thought to be the eye of the Gorgon Medusa.  Ancient greeks thought the other planets they saw were stars and named them the deities of their time, like Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and a couple other planets.

There are many people out there that say they can sell the naming rights to people for stars.  In the scientific community they are considered a fraud because the scientific community will not recognize those names nor use them.  So it's a cool novelty that you would have a piece of paper saying you named a star but it isn't technically true since the scientists will never use your name when talking about a star. 

Here are some pictures of different types of stars with brief descriptions below the pictures.  If you have any questions or comments please leave them, we would like to hear anything you have to say about what you have read on this site.