ZONAUTARA.com – The fact that the sun is a star is now common knowledge. However, it took scientists centuries to conclude. How do we know the sun is a star?
Sun and the stars in general shine together in the sky. The difference is, the sun only “rises” during the day, but the stars only exist at night. The sun can be so hot that it literally burns your skin. Stars, on the other hand, provide no warmth at all. How do astronomers see that the sun is a star?
One of the main keys is energy output or commonly referred to as solar luminosity and star similar. If the star looks dim while the sun looks dazzling, it’s only because the sun is closer.
The luminosity of an object can be found by knowing how bright the object is and its distance. After knowing the distance to an object, we can calculate its luminosity.
The next challenge is that smart people since ancient Greece began to estimate how far away the sun is, but measuring the distance to the star takes much longer.
To calculate the distance to a star, scientists use the parallax method, which relies on how a distant object shifts its position relative to a nearby object when the observer shifts its position.
Because the star is so far away, astronomers have to wait until they have a sufficiently powerful telescope before they can get an accurate parallax measurement. Once determined, they found that, the sun and the stars pumped out the amount energy comparable every second.
The next step in showing that the sun is a star is that they are made of essentially the same material. This can be proven by involving sending sunlight or starlight through a prism into rainbow-like colors.
With a sufficiently powerful spectrograph, astronomers saw that Rainbow incomplete in both light. There are dark bands that are not random but appear in a certain pattern. Physicists soon discovered that the pattern of these dark streaks was like the fingerprint of certain elements (such as hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, and oxygen) in the gases that light traveled through on its way to the spectrograph. The dark stripe pattern for the stars and sun is basically the same.
With spectroscopy, astronomy became astrophysics. In the next decade, astronomers might uncover the secrets of architecture on the inside star.
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