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Oftentimes you may associate blue with freezing, or red with hot, but with
stars it’s exactly the opposite. Blue stars are the hottest, with
their surfaces sometimes exceeding 50,000°
Fahrenheit. Yellow stars, like the Sun, are cooler, but still very
hot. Their surfaces reach about 9,932°
Fahrenheit. Red stars are the coolest, with their surfaces sometimes
less than 5,000°
Fahrenheit. The biggest and brightest stars are the hottest.
Some of the big ones can grow to be over 100 times the size of our
Sun. Their surface temperature can exceed 90,000°
Fahrenheit. This heat makes them blue in color, or sometimes even
white.
Stars of
different colors and temperatures last for different periods of time. Blue
and white stars are the ones with the most fuel, but they use it up quickly,
only lasting a few billion years before they run out. The yellow stars, similar
to the Sun, last about 10 billion years before they run out of fuel. The small,
red stars last the longest - over thousands of billions of years. When a star
runs out of fuel, it swells up into a red giant or a supergiant. These large
stars are very cool, because their cores are no longer producing fuel.
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