AaS! 141: Astro101 Part 3 - What is a Star?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s time for school! The Astro101 series will cover some of the most important questions in astronomy. In today’s lesson, we’ll have: What are the different kinds of stars? Why does classification in astronomy make no sense? How the heck do we define a “star”, anyway? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Music by Jason Grady and Nick Bain. Thanks to Cathy Rinella for editing.

Hosted by Paul M. Sutter, astrophysicist and the one and only Agent to the Stars (http://www.pmsutter.com).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back students.
0:12.5	Class is in session for our Astro 101 series.
0:17.2	And remember, there will be a quiz on Friday, so be sure to be taking notes it will not be
0:23.2	open book or open podcast is going to rely solely on the contents of your own brain for good or
0:31.2	ill so just remember that as we start today's lesson on stars now stars are kind of a big deal in astronomy. For a very
0:41.8	long time, they were the only deal in astronomy. They were just the thing. And like, it's, it's so
0:48.6	easy. I love these deceptively simple questions.
0:59.4	Questions that seem like they should be easy to answer, but it turns out it's kind of hard to answer.
1:00.5	And today's simple question is, what exactly is a star?
1:06.7	Like, you know, back in the day, way back in the day, like thousands of years ago, it was just a tiny point of light in the night sky.
1:14.7	And it's definitely not a planet.
1:17.2	The planets were also tiny points of light in the night sky, but planets did something else.
1:22.0	They did something different.
1:23.0	They wandered around.
1:24.2	They had their own thing going on.
1:26.5	And they definitely weren't comets.
1:28.0	Comits were very, very odd. No one was exactly sure what comets were. Like maybe there
1:32.9	were some sort of aerial phenomenon, maybe some sort of meteorological event. Maybe it had
1:39.2	something to do with the heavens. Who knows? But the stars are definitely not comets because comets are weird and fuzzy
1:46.7	and just, just weird. The stars stayed fixed. That was about it. Like, they were just fixed
1:54.9	points of light in the night sky. Like every year, you'd see the exact same set of stars,
1:59.6	the exact same constellations.
	...

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