Our Sun is a pale yellow star. Generally the color of the stars- a stunningly diverse palette of colors. One of the constellations is called “Jewelry Box”. Scattered across the black velvet of the night sky are sapphire and blue stars. Between them, in the middle of the constellation, is a bright orange star.
Differences in the color of stars are explained by the fact that stars have different temperatures.
This is why this happens. Light is wave radiation. The distance between the crests of one wave is called its length. The waves of light are very short. How much? Try dividing an inch into 250,000 equal parts (1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters). Several such parts will make up the wavelength of light.Despite such an insignificant wavelength of light, the slightest difference between the sizes of light waves dramatically changes the color of the picture we observe. This occurs because light waves have different wavelengths are perceived by us as different colors . For example, the wavelength of red is one and a half times longer than the wavelength of blue. White color is a beam consisting of photons of light waves of different lengths, that is, from rays of different colors.
From everyday experience we know that the color of bodies depends on their temperature. Place an iron poker on the fire. As it heats up, it first turns red. Then she will blush even more. If the poker could be heated even more without melting it, it would turn from red to orange, then yellow, then white, and finally blue-white.
The sun is a yellow star. The temperature on its surface is 5,500 degrees Celsius. The surface temperature of the hottest blue star exceeds 33,000 degrees.
Scientists have formulated physical laws that relate color and temperature. The hotter the body, the greater the radiation energy from its surface and the shorter the length of the emitted waves. Blue color has a shorter wavelength than red. Therefore, if a body emits blue wavelengths, then it is hotter than a body emitting red light. Atoms of hot gases in stars emit particles called photons. The hotter the gas, the higher the energy of the photons and the shorter their wavelength. Therefore, the hottest new stars emit in the blue and white range. As stars use up their nuclear fuel, they cool down. Therefore, old, cooling stars emit in the red range of the spectrum. Middle-aged stars, such as the Sun, emit in the yellow range.Our Sun is 149 million kilometers away from Earth, so we can clearly see its color. Other stars are trillions of kilometers or more away from us. Even with the help of powerful telescopes, we cannot say with certainty what color they are. To clarify this question, scientists pass light from stars through special device— spectrograph. It can be used to reveal the spectral composition of starlight.
By the color of a star you can calculate its age.
Astronomers determine the color of a star by the color of the most intense radiation in its spectrum. Knowing the color of a star, you can use simple mathematical formulas to calculate the temperature of the star's surface. And by the temperature you can judge its age.>> Why do they differ in colors?
Space telescopes, first Hubble, are synonymous with better understanding our universe, but astronomers and astrophysicists don't want to let Hubble retire, and they plan to use the satellite until it becomes the color value in Hubble's images. In terms of the variety of stars it contains, the Universe is well stocked in a candy store.
The color of a star carries a lot of information about it, such as telling us what temperature it is or how heavy it is. On English language this is an easy way to remember the Star Types in the correct order. These are incredibly hot objects. Recent research shows that three out of four such stars are very close to others. Moreover, one star in three such stars is so close to its neighbor that in the future they may drown in the same object! Send your proposal to. Our understanding of the cosmos is naturally directed towards some kind of order.
Let's talk about why colors differ in a language accessible to children. This information will be useful for children and their parents.
Even ancient people never tired of watching the heavenly lights with awe and wonder. Before modern sensitive instruments appeared, only white blinking dots were seen in the stars. Parents or teachers At school must explain to the children that because starlight has to break through the Earth's atmosphere, they appear to flicker.
This is a feature of our minds - we like to think that everything has an understandable and logical structure. Stars circulate around planets to form star systems, and special stars appear. Star systems are concentrated in galaxies. But our knowledge is still enriched and stormed by this ordered image. For example, we recently learned about the actual existence of so-called lonely planets, which are not attached to any solar system.
Exactly the same, as it turned out, with a huge number of stars. As a team of astronomers led by astrophysicist Michael Zemkov demonstrated, half of them are located outside the galaxy. How did the researchers come to this conclusion? Observing the brightness of the observable universe. There were quite a lot infrared radiation, a sort of small glow that didn't match the galaxy in the sky. In the scientific paper, the researchers note that this radiation may originate from stars outside galaxies. The intensity of this light allows us to estimate that there are stars in galaxies!
Explanation for children we need to start from the past. Just two centuries ago, astronomers believed that everyone was exclusively white. In fact, these objects can come in all the colors of the rainbow. As researchers began to learn more about light waves, they realized that light is divided into types, and the waves differ in width and density. When studying the planets, it became clear that light can be perceived in different shades colors based on wavelength. Moreover, temperature also affects this length.
Stars, as you know, are born from clusters. But later, for example, during the penetration of galaxies, they could be thrown out by gravity. This is the most likely explanation for this phenomenon. 
The discovery was accidental - Nemtsov's team expected to receive radiation from the oldest distant galaxies. But their transition to red was too small - the light came from closer and younger sources, i.e. formed stars.
We know little about space, and every discovery confirms our knowledge. Stars are similar to our sun, but much deeper. And to think that this is just a small part of all the stars that our galaxy contains! Going further, we can say that the Milky Way is not alone. How many galaxies are there in the Universe? What about the ones we haven't seen? There are not enough grains of sand on all the beaches in the world!
Soon a new section appeared - “black body radiation”, in which they continued to explore different temperatures and colors. Even for the little ones It will be interesting to know that cold ones release energy in the red tones of the electromagnetic color spectrum, while hot ones release energy in the blue and white. It turns out that explain to the children possible schematically. It's all about temperature, which is why they turn red, orange, yellow, green and blue.
It is difficult to imagine the size of the Universe at such magnitudes. But let's return to the beginning - to the vicinity of our solar system. First we have to ask ourselves, what are typical stars? These are huge gas spheres that contain mainly hydrogen, which has a high temperature - even tens of thousands of degrees. But that's just the surface temperature, which seems ridiculously low compared to what's inside. The center of such a star is very, very hot - it reaches over a dozen million degrees!
With such high temperatures Hydrogen atoms can combine to form helium. It was this reaction that was in the stars from the very beginning of their existence, and this cosmic furnace. In addition, stars emit light. The photons contained in it move at high speed - they take about 8.5 minutes to reach the Earth. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 1 second, and then we see the Moon as it was a second ago. Within a few seconds, light is capable of traveling up to 7.5 Earth's equatorial circuits.
Children should be aware that color is influenced by another factor. If there are stars in the atmosphere additional elements, then it can change the wavelength of light, and this will affect the color we observe. This explains why there are so many different colors in the stars being studied.
Red stars have the weakest temperatures. It does not rise above 3000 degrees. Ours burns up to 6000 degrees Celsius and glows orange/yellow. The green ones are about 10,000 degrees Celsius, and the blue ones (the hottest) are about 25,000 degrees Celsius.
The nearest star outside the solar system is about 4 light years away. Proxima The Centauri dwarf, belonging to a system of three stars, circled around. This system is called Alpha Centauri, and it is visible as a single point in the sky due to its great distance. Observing this agreement, we see what happened 4 years ago, precisely because of the limited speed of light. Read on the brightness visible in the night sky. Sirius, which is also not a single star, is Sirius, a system consisting of a main and a white dwarf star.
It's about 8 light years away, twice as far as Alpha Centauri. Read more Glossary of literary terms we observe. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, so naturally the farthest objects we see are galaxies that are just a few light years away. But this is not the end - there is more and more behind them more stars- light from such a distant object, for example 20 billion light years, did not have time to reach us. The size of the observable universe is much smaller than its actual size.
Giant stars waste energy much faster than tiny ones. This significantly shortens their life cycle.
