what is the brightest stars in the universe?
98094
in our galaxy is sirius but in tho whole uneversum WHO KNOWS :P
23967
Stars are massive, glowing balls of hot gases, mostly hydrogen and helium. Some stars are extremely hot, while others are cooler. You can tell by the color of light that the stars give off. If you look at the coals in a charcoal grill, you know that the red glowing coals are cooler than the white hot ones. The same is true for stars. A blue or white star is hotter than a yellow star, which is hotter than a red star. Temperature of stars range in the high hundreds to thousands degrees F. So to touch the stars that are in the sky is almost impossible, as your body would burn due to high temperatures surrounding them.
809888
All stars are round, and there are many trillions of stars, although you can only see about 3,000 of them at any one time without a telescope. The sun is a typical star, only much closer than all the others.
68394
There was a study done by a group of Australian astronomers where they calculated (somehow) that there are approximately 70,000 million million million (or 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) stars in the known Universe, which means these are just the ones that we can see with our telescopes.  This is supposed to be 10 times the number of grains of sand on all the beaches and deserts in the world.
671170
Are you including the stars that are being created, as well as those that do not actually exist anymore but have died out/ supernova'd/ etc. that we are just still seeing since the light has to travel so far?  \n\nI would be interested in how you determined this number ^_^
1032045
Download and run the program Stellarium from sourceforge.\n\nIts open source, and if you give it your location and the date/time it will show you the night sky for you locally and identify all of the constellations.
77447
The brightest star in the sky is Sirius (aka the Dog Star) and it is sort of bluish, and iridescent.  It flashes so many colors that I have many times had people convinced it was a plane and bet me money it wasn't a star, only to see it sitting quite still among the stars for hours.  THis star would have probably been on the western horizon pretty late, like around 2 or 3 am (it's usually rather high in the south when I go to work at 10pm).\n\nMars, being rather red, is also quite visible recently, and would be hovering near the horizon also quite late.  Mercury is always near the sun, and is likely to be seen in the west just after sunset (but I can't say for sure, since I haven't seen it recently--it's usually already set by the time I wake up for work).  And it seems like I recently saw Venus being quite right, and it should be setting a few hours after sunset.\n\nIf you give the color and the time, I could give you a better answer.
162380
Most of the stars we see with the naked eye are within our galaxy.  If you lived in the southern hemisphere, you could see the Mangellanic clouds, which are two small satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.  You would not be able to see induvidual stars, but you would see the glow of millions of stars within them.\nIn the northern hemishere, if you are in a very dark place, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 2.5 million light years away but you can see the glow of the billions of stars that make up that galaxy.\nBut all the induvidual stars we see in the night sky with the naked eye, they are within our Milky Way galaxy.\n\nAnd for stars between galaxies...yes there are.  There are a few stars that get cast off and tossed into intergalactic space.  There is one right now that has been flung out of our galaxy at a bit over a million miles an hour when it had a close encounter with the black hole in the core of our galaxy.  There are millions, perhaps billions, of stars in the galactic halo around the Milky Way...they are just difficult to see, even in a big telescope, as they are mosly dim red dwarfs.  The space between galaxies is not empty...things are just spread out a bit more.
92547
This is a very difficult question. We don't really know how many stars currently exist, so let's rephrase the question to "how many stars in the night sky visible to the naked eye still exist?" (An easier question would be "does star xyz still exist?") If all of these stars are classified into groups whose average lifespans are known, and if the current ages of these stars can be estimated, then using the estimated time that light takes to travel from a particular star to Earth, we can determine if the star has already gone supernova, or if it has darkened. Since most stars visible to the naked eye are relatively young (as compared with super-distant stars visible through huge telescopes), it is likely that a significant proportion of them do still exist. But, again, the question is extremely difficult, but makes for some good thinking.
65484
To clarify more, cepheid stars are one the most common way to determine the distance to a distant galaxy. These stars are extremely uniform in their brightness, so by measuring their brightness as seen from the Earth, scientists can determing how far away that star would have to be to be that faint.
471765
Our sun is solidly in the average category. The exact average star is about 1,000,000 miles in diameter.\n\nMany other stars are spectacularly larger or smaller.\n\nThe lifespan of larger stars is shorter.  Srars become brighter at the end of their life, when hydrogen nuclei have been exhausted.  \n\nWhen stars become supernovae, other elements are created, the last one being iron, and much material is blown off.\n\nThen you have a dying monarch of light.  Red and white drwarfs.\n\nSites for stellar evolution info:\nhttp://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=ks&p=stellar+evolution\n\nOur sun has a remaining life span at current luminosity of 25 billion years.  That should give us enough time to figure out what to do when it goes into the ending processes.\n\nDetailed information about our sun and neighborhood:\nhttp://www.urantia.org/papers/toc.html\ngo to Paper 41 and Paper 57
160778
Twinkle twinkle little star\n\nThere aren't many nursery rhymes about astronomy. But 'twinkle twinkle little star' makes a useful point. We can tell which lights in the night sky are stars because they appear to twinkle. Planets, on the other hand, don't, they shine steadily in the sky.\n\nStars twinkle because they are very far away, and so appear as tiny points of light in our night sky. Some of this light is absorbed by moving air in the Earth's atmosphere, making the star appear to sparkle.\n\nPlanets, like Saturn or Jupiter, don't sparkle. This is because they are a lot closer to the Earth and so they look bigger in our sky than stars.\n\n\nThe Pistol Star is the brightest in the known Universe\n\nRather than being points of light, planets are small discs. As their light is more spread out, even if some of it is absorbed by our atmosphere, some of the light still filters through, so the planet doesn't twinkle. This means that you can tell the difference between a planet and a star without even needing a telescope, just by seeing if it twinkles!\n\nWeighing a star:\n\nAs for 'wondering what they are', starlight also contains an extraordinary amount of information that can answer that very question.\n\nWeighing a star isn't as difficult as it sounds as you don't need an enormous set of cosmic scales, just one equation. The more massive a star is, the more energy it gives off. So first of all, astronomers measure the star's 'luminosity', the rate at which it emits energy. Then they can work out its mass.\n\nMeasuring a star's temperature:\n\nOnce the mass of the star is known, you can calculate the temperature inside its burning core. Stars perform a delicate balancing act between gas pressure pushing outwards and gravity pulling inwards. Mathematical equations can be used to map this. Then by measuring the size and mass of the star, astronomers can calculate the temperature of the core.\n\n\nWhat's inside a star?\n\nEven more incredibly, just by looking at starlight astronomers can discover what a star is made from.\n\nThe light that we see is just one kind of radiation known as 'visible light'. Other kinds include X-rays, ultraviolet, microwaves, radio waves and infrared. Different stars give out varying amounts of these signals, known as their 'spectrum'.\n\nWhen measured, the spectrum appears as a series of bright and dark lines positioned at specific points or 'frequencies'. This is the blueprint of a star and provides a wealth of information about what is happening inside.\n\nAs elements are heated inside the star, they absorb and emit energy, creating a 'blip' in the star's spectrum. So the position and strength of these lines reveal what elements are inside the star. Stars are classified into 'spectral types' according to the shape of this spectrum.\n\nLooking back in time:\n\nAlthough time travel isn't physically possible yet, we can see back in time just by looking out into space.\n\nLight from the Sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth. So we are seeing what the Sun looked like 8 minutes ago. Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour, lags behind by 4.3 years. So, the further we look out into space, the further we are looking into the past.\n\nThe distance that light travels in a year is called a 'light year'. The furthest that astronomers have ever seen are about 12 billion light years away, from a time just after the Big Bang, when the Universe was just a baby.\n\nI hope this helps....\n\nDon
243085
I was gonna look up tonight, but I forgot which way up is again :)\n\nSeriously though folks....Orion is a cool constellation for sure. If you've got a fairly high-powered set of binoculars you can get a neat view of the Orion Nebula (M42). Sweep the binoculars slowly in the area below the three belt stars and you should pick it out.\n\nAlso, the red giant star Betelgeuse is in Orion. It's the bright, orangeish star. It's 520 light years away, with a diameter between 480-800 million miles. If Betelgeuse was where our Sun is, its outer layers would extend out to the orbit of Mars. It's also a prime candidate to become a supernova!\n\nGod is spelled B-I-G B-A-N-G\nPBrax@netscape.com
224500
Wikipedia claims that the observable universe contains about 7 × 1022 stars, organized in about 100 billion galaxies, which themselves form clusters and superclusters. An Ask the Scientist response to this question claimed that there are about 10 billion (10^10) stars in an average galaxy, \nand there are about 10 billion galaxies that we can observe in the universe, so the answer is 100 billion billion or 10^20. I don't think it is an issue that we have a precise answer for as yet.
440062
The universe contains approximately  200,000,000,000,000,000,000 (200 BILLION BILLION) stars in galaxies scattered throughout the universe.  Our solar system is located in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.  The Milky Way galaxy contains approx. 200,000,000,000 stars.  \n\nThe universe is the largest of the three organizational structures in your question.  \n\nHope this helps!
27902
It's name is Polaris and is the brightest star in the Ursa Minor constellation. This can help you more: \nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris
496226
STARS AND NEBULAE.\n\nMost of the things you can see in the night sky are stars: a few thousand are visible to the unaided eye. A star is a hot ball of mostly hydrogen gas; the Sun is an example of a typical, ordinary star. Gravity keeps the gas from evaporating into space, and pressure due to the star's high temperature and density keeps the ball from shrinking. In the core of the star, the temperature and densities are high enough to sustain nuclear fusion reactions, and the energy produced by these reactions works its way to the surface and radiates into space as heat and light. When the fuel for the fusion reactions is depleted, the structure of the star changes. The process of building up heavier elements from lighter ones by nuclear reactions, and adjusting the internal structure to balance gravity and pressure, is called stellar evolution. \nLooking at a star through a telescope can tell us many of its important properties. The color of a star tells us its temperature, and the temperature depends on some combination of the star's mass and evolutionary phase. Usually, observations also allow us to find the luminosity of the star, or the rate at which it radiates energy as heat and light. \nAll stars visible to the unaided eye are in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way is system of roughly 100 billion stars, along with a great deal of interstellar material. The galaxy is shaped like a flattened disk embedded in a round, faint halo. Gravity keeps the stars from drifting away, and the motions of the stars keep the system from falling in on itself. The Milky Way has no distinct edge - the distribution of stars tapers off gradually with increasing distance from the center. The SDSS detects stars more than a million times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye, far enough to see the outer structure of the Milky Way. \nStar Colors and Luminosities: The H-R Diagram\nAstronomers often make plots of the luminosities of stars compared to their colors. The first such charts were made in the early twentieth century, when astronomers took spectra of thousands of stars, then placed the spectra into a sequence based on the appearance of several different features. The classes of stars were given different letters as names; in order of decreasing temperature, they are OBAFGKMLT. The hottest stars are class O, while the coolest are class T. Two astronomers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell, independently started to wonder what would happen if they compared stars' luminosities to their spectral classifications (or, alternatively, to their temperatures). They knew that some stars were hotter and more luminous than the sun, and that others were cooler and less luminous. Hertzsprung and Russell found that 90% of the stars fell into a narrow band they termed the "main sequence." Today, we call this type of plot a Hertzsprung-Russell (or H-R) diagram. \nAstronomers further divide each letter into ten categories from 0 to 9, with 0 being the hottest star in that spectral class and 9 being the coolest. So, a B1 star is hotter than a B2 star, and a B9 star is hotter than an A0 star. Our own sun is at the "hot" end of the G range with a surface temperature of 5,770° K; therefore, it's called a G2 star. \nSpectral classes give us a convenient way to refer to most types of stars - from O0, the hottest at over 25,000° K, down to T9, the coolest failed stars at 1,000° K. Each spectral type of star is associated with a specific color: all G-type stars like the sun are yellow, all M-type stars appear red, and all B-type stars are bluish. Thus, this system of letters and numbers tells us where a star is on the horizontal (color or temperature) axis of the H-R diagram. \nTwo alternative systems tell us approximately where on the vertical (luminosity) axis a star can be found. One system uses absolute magnitude, a measure of luminosity derived from the apparent magnitude, or brightness of the star