What is visible light from the stars?

Answer 1

They produce, heat and light.

Answer 2

stars are just balls of gas in the atmosphere burning, 1/2 of the stars you can see in the sky are burnt out allready, it's just that there so far away from the earth you can still see the light coming off of them

Answer 3

The Sun gives off its own light, generated in the nuclear fusion reaction. Our Sun is an average, or perhaps a little bigger than average star, and all the stars also generate their own light.

The Moon and the planets do NOT generate any light, but are merely reflectors of the light of the Sun.

Answer 4

The light is the same as you see from the sun. It is ordinary light that has traveled extraordinary distances over unimaginably long periods of time to reach us here on earth.

All the individual stars that you see in the night sky are in the Milky Way, our galaxy. These stars are orbiting the center of the galaxy just like our sun, so they are not moving toward us or away from us at great velocity. Their light comes to us pretty much as it was when it left. However the distant galaxies, only a small number of which are visible to the naked eye, are another matter. They are moving away from us at varying velocities, some of them at extremely high velocity. The light from these objects arrives here in a 'red-shifted' state; it is still coming toward us at light speed, but the rapid retreat causes the observed frequency of the light to be reduced toward the red end of the visible spectrum (hence the term red-shift). It is very similar to the Doppler effect that we easily notice with passing trains and in some ordinary traffic situations.

The very few galaxies we can see appear to our eye to be individual stars, but they are not. Some star clusters may appear to be hazy or blurry. One of our closest galactic neighbors, Andromeda, practically in our back yard at a mere 2,500,000 light years away and closing, would appear wider than the moon if we could actually see it the way it appears in time-exposure photographs.

Answer 5

What you are seeing is the light produced from the nuclear reaction occurring within the star, the process of fusion occurring.

Why Stars GlowStars glow for the same reason that the sun glows. They are gigantic balls of flaming gases. The reason the stars look so small, is the incredible distance between earth and the stars. (The light that we see from the stars can be millions of years old because it took that long for the light to travel this far!)

Answer 6

Enough light reaches us from some stars so that we can see them in the night sky with our eyes. But it isn't enough for us to do anything useful with it, like reading a book, or seeing where we're going. The only star near enough to make a difference in our lives with its light is the sun.

Answer 7

For most of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion in its core releasing energy , including light energy and heat energy, that emerges from the star's interior and then radiates into outer space.

Answer 8

A star is a sun, just like ours here in the milky way galaxy.

its tons of fire and gas and craziness. But there really far away. So they arent nearly as bright obviously.

Some are so far away, that if they burned out, we wouldn't even know for like... years. Because their so far away that it takes the light years to get here. or in that case, the darkness

Answer 9

Yes, that's why we can see them. However, they are so far away that the light does not have much affect on us. We only see one star in the day, the Sun, but it is close enough to make things bright, giving us day time. While we can see thousands of stars at night and there are billions more out there that are shining, they are so far away that they don't brighten the Earth in the way the Sun can.

Answer 10

Stars produce energy from nuclear fusion. In the hot, dense interior of the star, hydrogen nuclei (that is to say, protons) smash into other hydrogen nuclei with enough force that they fuse together and become helium. A tiny, TINY bit of mass is converted into energy.

We wouldn't notice it at all, except for the fact that uncounted jillions of these happen EVERY SECOND, and all those tiny, TINY bits of energy add up to be a whole LOT of energy. Enough to keep the star hot enough to keep causing even more fusion, and enough to keep the monstrous gravitational forces that are trying to crush the mass into nothing from doing so. And there's enough hydrogen in a star like our Sun to keep the thing going for 9 BILLION years or so.

Smaller stars fuse hydrogen much more slowly, and don't burn as brightly, but will last far longer. Bigger stars burn more quickly, and the biggest stars may exhaust their fuel in only a few hundred million years, and then explode.