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Wednesday, September 30, 2020

The Sizes of Stars

The universe we inhabit is full of wonders. It's filled, for instance, with hundreds of billions of galaxies, of which our Milky Way is just one, and each of those galaxies is comprised of billions of stars. These stars range in size from very big to unimaginably huge, thousands of times larger than our sun.

To get an idea of the range of size of the stars in our galaxy watch this video:
The word "awesome" is overused in our discourse, often employed to describe things that are really quite ordinary or mundane, but it's entirely appropriate, I think, to use the word to describe red giants.

It's also appropriate to invoke the word "awesome" when reflecting on the fact that scientists believe that the atoms that make up our earth and everything on it, including our bodies, were created long ago in the cores of stars that no longer exist. According to the scientific consensus you are indeed, stardust.