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Stars are the little bright lights that you see in the night sky. There are
billions and trillions of stars. You'd never be able to count them in one night. Did
you know that shooting stars are not really stars? They are little things
floating out in space that flew into our atmosphere. Here are some explanations of
some stars in our Universe.
Sirius
Sirius
is the Dog Star and the brightest star in the sky, placed in the constellation
Canis Major. The star was highly admired by the ancient Egyptians, who viewed it
as a gift of the rising of the Nile and of a following good harvest. Many
Egyptian temples were built so that the light of Sirius shown in the inner
rooms.
The
brightness of Sirius is in large part an importance of its closeness to the
earth. The distance of the star from the earth is 8.7 light-years, or 51
trillion miles, and it is one of the closest stars. It can be seen from every
part of the earth. The size of the star is 2.4 times bigger than the sun, and
its surface temperature is higher than the sun’s. Sirius’s abnormality in
movement led the German astronomer, Friedrich Bessel, to believe that a formerly
unseen star followed Sirius. The American astronomer, Alvan Clark, discovered
the star for the first time 18 years later in 1862. It was later shown to be a
white dwarf star.
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