• Question: How do stars appear in the night sky? What is the use of stars?

    Asked by Yashika to Ashley, Bernard, Carsten, MariaMagdalena, Monique on 19 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Monique Henson

      Monique Henson answered on 19 Nov 2015:

      Our Sun is a star. There are billions of stars in the Universe, but most of them are quite far away, so we see them as bright points in the sky. They aren’t necessarily useful on a day-to-day basis, but by studying stars we’ve learned lots about nuclear physics, gravity and the way that gases behave.

    • Photo: Ashley Hughes

      Ashley Hughes answered on 19 Nov 2015:

      Well starts are for the most part Suns (the sun is our closest star) that are burning bright a long way away! We can see them because the sky is dark and they’re bright…

      Historically they have been extremely useful for navigation, a great example of this is Polaris – the North Star. This basically told seafarers which way North was at night time so that they could point in the right direction.

      More recently Stars tell us more about how the universe was made, amongst many other interesting space things – like if you watch a star closely with special telescopes planets can be seen going around these stars and information on them obtained.

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