Why Do Stars Shine?

Ever since man set foot on Earth, these celestial bodies called stars have mystified us. While the sun and the moon signified day and night, there was just no justification for these tiny sparkling celestial bodies that twinkled in the sky. The advancement of science and the advent of telescope enabled man to study these heavenly bodies more closely. Leading to the birth of an entirely new branch of science called astronomy. Thus, he began his quest for unrevealing the mysteries surrounding stars. The study of stars continues even today, with more advanced telescopes that magnify more than a million times, giving new insights into their movements and behavior.
To figure out why stars shine, one must know what stars are actually made of. Stars are balls of glowing plasma, so hot that we can’t even imagine the temperatures. The surface of a star like our sun is cooler at the surface (5,800 Kelvin) but its core is the hottest place, at 15 million Kelvin. They are held together by their own gravity and give off the heat that they produce. Our Sun is also a star that produces its own heat and light. The process of producing heat for each star involves fusion. The heat and light energy is trapped inside the star for many years, and when finally it comes out, it produces the light through which the star shines.
Light travels at a high speed and will continue to travel until something blocks it. The light we see from the stars is of billion of stars together that are at many distances from the earth. Each time we see the light of a star, we are seeing a star’s past. The light the stars emit has come from millions of years ago. We are actually seeing the moment that each sun released the energy that had waited and fought to get outside of the sun and was carried through the universe to us.
Nevertheless, we still acknowledge their beauty and call celebrities of the society “stars”. Unlike what they appear from here, a star is a barren landmass, without any sign of life and with no means of sustaining it in the future. So, the answer to the question as to why stars shine is really that they are a powerhouse of energy, with gigantic cores of fusion reaction that causes energy to be released and sent out into the universe as light.

By: Surbhi 

Content:https://www.planetsforkids.org/why-do-stars-shine.html