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A star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. [ 1] The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night; their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light.
In 2016, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) [2] to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, dated July 2016, [3] included a table of 125 stars comprising the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN (on 30 June and 20 July 2016) together with names of stars adopted by the IAU Executive Committee ...
Below are lists of the largest stars currently known, ordered by radius and separated into categories by galaxy. The unit of measurement used is the radius of the Sun (approximately 695,700 km; 432,300 mi). [1] The Sun, the orbit of Earth, Jupiter, and Neptune, compared to four stars.
The following is a list of particularly notable actual or hypothetical stars that have their own articles in Wikipedia, but are not included in the lists above. BPM 37093 — a diamond star. Cygnus X-1 — X-ray source. EBLM J0555-57Ab — is one of the smallest stars ever discovered.
Additionally, astronomers have found 6 white dwarfs (stars that have exhausted all fusible hydrogen), 21 brown dwarfs, as well as 1 sub-brown dwarf, WISE 0855−0714 (possibly a rogue planet ). The closest system is Alpha Centauri, with Proxima Centauri as the closest star in that system, at 4.2465 light-years from Earth.
In practice, names are only universally used for the very brightest stars ( Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, etc.) and for a small number of slightly less bright but "interesting" stars ( Algol, Polaris, Mira, etc.). For other naked eye stars, the Bayer or Flamsteed designation is often preferred. In addition to the traditional names, a small number of ...
Stellar classification. In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a prism or diffraction grating into a spectrum exhibiting the rainbow of colors interspersed with spectral lines.
The solar mass ( ) is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as clusters, nebulae and galaxies. It is equal to the mass of the Sun, about two nonillion kilograms. This is about 332,950 times the mass of the Earth or 1,048 times the mass of Jupiter.