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1. At the most conservative estimate, there are at least 10 billion trillion stars in the universe
2.Red stars are relatively small and cool, while the hottest burn blue-white
3.Medieval alchemists studied the North Star, believing it held the secret to perpetual motion.
4.Stars are formed from dense knots contained in large clouds of dust and gas called nebulae
5.There is enough matter in the Orion Nebula to produce over 10,000 stars
6.The ancient Greeks believed that the stars and all other heavenly bodies made a daily rotation around the Earth
7.By astronomical standards, a star that was formed 2 million years ago is considered to still be in its youth
8.Supergiants are massive stars that are hundreds of times the size of our sun
9.Our sun was formed 4600 million years ago and is expected to live a total of 10,000 million years
10.The nuclear reaction that takes place in a hydrogen bomb is the same reaction that fuels stars
11.One in four Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth, rather than the other way around
12.One in five Americans don’t know the difference between astrology—fortune-telling based on the movement of stars and planets—and astronomy, the scientific study of objects outside of Earth’s atmosphere.
13.The sun constitutes 99% of the total mass of our solar system
14.Every day, approximately 275 million new stars are formed in the universe
15.Given its chemical makeup, astronomers hypothesize that if you could taste the dust from the nebula that gave birth to our sun, it would taste like raspberries
16.A nebula that has only 6% less the mass of our sun cannot become a star; it will instead become a planet
17.Stars are deeply romantic for human beings and serve as a perennial symbol of progress and self-transcendence, as in the advice to "reach for the stars."
18.When you look up at the night sky with the naked eye, every star you see is part of our own Milky Way Galaxy
19.The Milky Way Galaxy and the stars that it contains are, on average, around 13.6 billion years old
20.Most of the stars in the Milky Way lie in approximately the same plane, meaning that our galaxy is basically a flat disc, 100,000 light years across
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