Star Facts for Kids

23 Star Facts For Kids

1. A star is a bright, spheroid shaped ball of plasma held together by its own gravity.
2. A star is classified by the International Astronomers Union (AUI) as a solar or extrasolar simple astronomical object.
3. There are an estimated 200 billion trillion stars (200 sextillion, 21 zeros) in the observable Universe.
4. Stars are born in stellar nurseries, which is a dense region in an interstellar molecular cloud that has collapsed.
5. Stars produce an enormous amount of energy through the process of thermonuclear fission (hydrogen to helium).
6. There are many different types of stars, all with varying behavior, brightness, color, and size.
7. Stars are classified by spectral type, the spectral types are in order of hottest to coolest, O, B, A, F, G, K, and M.
8. Stars with a spectral type of O, B, or A are the hottest and have a blue color.
9. Stars with a spectral type of F are in the middle road in terms of temperate and have a blue/white color.
10. Stars with a spectral type of G are the third coolest and have a white/yellow color.
11. Stars with a spectral type of K are the second coolest and have a orange/red color.
12. Stars with a spectral type of M are the coolest stars and have a red color.
13. The most common type of stars are M-type stars (red dwarfs) and the rarest type of stars are O-type.
14. M-type stars have a long lifespan, with some having an estimated lifespan of trillions of years.
15. O-type stars have a short lifespan, with some having an estimated lifespan of only 5 million years.
16. O-type stars have extremely violent deaths, known as supernova explosions.
17. The most popular and widely known star is the Sun in the center of our Solar System.
18. Our Sun is a G-Type main-sequence star (G2V type) and is around 4.6 billion years old.
19. The closest star to Earth, excluding our Sun, is Proxima Centauri at 4.2465 light-years away.
20. The farthest star from Earth is Earendel (WHL0137-LS) at 28 billion light-years away.
21. The smallest star discovered in our Universe is OGLE-TR-122b with a 0.12 solar radius.
22. The largest star discovered in our Universe is UY Scuti (BD-12 5055) with a 1,708 solar radius.
23. The oldest star discovered in our Universe is Methuselah (HD 149283) with an age between 12 to 13 billion years old.

Star Pictures

Pictures are one of the best ways for people to learning about something. That is why we are providing you with the below images to help you with your research on stars. Below you will find three pictures that represent stars. These pictures should help you better understand stars and what they look like.

A picture of a yellow star.

A picture of a star in a nebula.

A picture of two stars in a binary system.