January 28, 2016

• How do we know what stars like our sun are made of?

  

  There are more than 100 billion of them(stars) in our galaxy alone, but we cannot land on them. Nevertheless we have found ways to study them.

  By Chris Baraniuk of the BBC
  28 January 2016

  Every day, for billions of years, the Sun has risen over Earth's horizon. It may be 150 million kilometres away, but our star shines so brilliantly in the sky that we cannot look at it with our own eyes, lest we damage them. At the surface, the Sun is 5,500C – hot enough to melt any landing probe into oblivion before it even got close.
  In other words, the Sun is almost literally too hot to handle. But that does not mean we cannot study it.
  In fact, there are several ingenious techniques through which we have begun to unravel the secrets of the stars dotted throughout the night sky, as well as the one in our own backyard. How, then, is this possible?

  Click here for the complete story:

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