The Difference Between Stars and Planets in the Universe
Discover the major differences between stars and planets with this comprehensive guide! Learn what makes a star and planet unique and how they differ in the universe. There are many things you should know about the stars and planets in the universe. Stars are celestial bodies that emit light continuously.
They are made up of light elements like hydrogen, helium, and other gases that are undergoing nuclear fusion in their cores. They can be spherical or elliptical in shape.
Stars and planets are two of the most observed objects in the night sky, but they couldn’t be more different. From their size and composition to how they were formed, stars and planets have drastically different characteristics, which can make them easy to identify at a glance.
Composition: What Is Each Made Of?
One of the major differences between stars and planets is their composition. Stars are composed mostly of gas and dust, while planets are made up of solid and liquid material. A star’s core is typically composed of hydrogen and helium, while a planet’s core is much denser and can contain a range of elements such as iron, silicon, oxygen, sulfur, or nitrogen.
Appearance: What Do They Look Like?
While a star appears as a small pinpoint of light in the night sky, a planet is generally visible to the naked eye but looks much larger and brighter from Earth. From afar, stars shine with an ethereal white or blue light, whereas planets emit a yellowish hue due to their composition of solid materials. When viewed through a telescope, stars appear as bright points of colored light while planets are easily distinguishable as having features like moons or rings around them.
Origins: How Do Stars and Planets Form?
Stars are formed from clouds of gas and dust — a process known as stellar nucleosynthesis — while planets form by accretion, or the gradual accumulation of matter. Stars form over millions of years when these clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. Planets typically form much faster than stars via the collision and gravitational attraction of small particles like rocks and ice. As they build up mass, they can eventually become large enough to have moons orbiting them and clear away other debris in their vicinity, forming asteroids belts or rings around them.
Life Cycles: How Long Do They Last?
Stars have much longer life cycles than planets. Stars typically last for billions of years and can become red giants, white dwarfs or even black holes. Planets, on the other hand, have significantly shorter life spans that only last for millions of years before their atmospheres dissipate and they are no longer habitable. A planet’s life cycle mainly depends on its size and proximity to a star; larger planets closer to stars will typically survive longer than smaller ones that are farther away.
Location: Where Are Stars and Planets Found?
Stars are usually found in galaxies and organized into collections known as star clusters, while planets are generally localized in single-star systems like our own solar system. Stars can also orbit around other stars to form what is known as a binary or multiple star system. Generally speaking, stars tend to occur much farther apart than planets do due to their immense size. Planets usually remain relatively close to their parent stars, forming the distinct orbits we see in many of our local planetary systems.
Size
Stars and planets in the Universe are two different types of celestial bodies. A star is a large, luminous astronomical object that has its own light, whereas a planet is a smaller, less luminous celestial body that revolves around a star.
The size of a star is determined by two main factors: it’s mass and the proportions of the elements it contains. Inside a star, elements are fused together (nuclear fusion) to create energy that pushes outwards. At the same time, the stars’ mass creates a gravitational force that pulls back inwards. These forces find a balance that determines the diameter of a star.
There are a lot of variations in the sizes of stars throughout the Universe. Some are smaller than the Sun, while others are larger.
Some of the largest known stars in our galaxy are hypergiants, which are more than a billion times the size of the Sun and are so massive that they could engulf all the other rocky planets in our Solar System. The biggest of these stars is Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion, which has a diameter that’s about 650 times the size of the Sun – about 0,9 billion kilometers!
These giants can withstand temperatures that are millions of degrees hotter than our Sun, and they’re capable of fusing helium into even heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. These stars are destined for supernova and/or black hole fates, but before they do, they swell to huge sizes that can extend for billions of kilometers.
This is the result of a simple balance between the outward radiation created by the fusion process and the inward gravitational force from the star’s mass. The bigger the outward radiation force, the larger the star will swell.
This simple balance is also the reason why we can see stars in our night sky but not their planets. The planets have a hard surface that lets them reflect the star’s light, while the stars have diffuse edges that let them absorb and transmit their own light.
Temperature
Stars and planets in the Universe vary in temperature. Some are relatively cool, like Mercury, while others are extremely hot, like Mars. The surface temperature of a planet is affected by three factors: its distance from the Sun, its surface reflectivity (albedo), and its atmosphere.
The average global surface temperature of a planet depends on the amount of solar energy it receives. The farther a planet is from the Sun, the less solar energy it receives, and the cooler it gets. The inverse is true, too: The closer a planet is to the Sun, the more solar energy it receives and the hotter it gets.
As a result, the average surface temperature of a planet can differ wildly from that of Earth. For example, Mercury, which is half as far from the Sun as Earth, is bone-chillingly cold when it is not receiving any sunlight.
On the other hand, Venus, which is close to the Sun but has an atmosphere that traps some of the sun’s rays, is much hotter than Earth and even more so when it is not receiving any sunlight.
Despite these differences, it is still possible to compare the temperature of stars and planets using basic physics and mathematics. Specifically, scientists can calculate a star’s surface temperature by measuring its luminosity, calculating its effective temperature, and plugging the terms into Stefan’s formula.
Astronomers also determine the color of a star by measuring its spectral line spectrum. The lowest-temperature stars appear red, while the hottest ones glow blue.
Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of atoms or molecules in a gas. This energy may reside in the translational kinetic energy of the molecules or in their vibrational energy. This kinetic energy can be derived from the probability distribution function of the energy of motion of the molecules or from statistical averages of microscopic states.
Historically, there have been various approaches to the explanation of temperature, including classical thermodynamics, kinetic theory of gases, and a microscopic interpretation based on statistical physics. The purely mechanical approach to the measurement of temperature is often more useful for gases and simple metals, but it can be difficult to interpret in condensed matter and solids.
Emission of Light
When a star is hot, it emits light in the form of a spectrum. This light is diagnostic of the elements that are present in the star’s atmosphere. Physicists have long wondered how matter could generate such a spectrum, but until Planck’s and Kirchhoff’s breakthroughs, they could not explain it.
Every material in the universe is made up of atoms and molecules. These are made up of electrons that orbit around a nucleus. Each atom and molecule has a set of energy levels called allowed energies. These allow electrons to be excited (jumped to higher energy levels) or repelled by a nucleus.
All these electrons have their own wavelength and the amount of energy needed to kick an electron up to a higher level is determined by what type of atom it is, how many electrons there are in the atom, and its temperature. This process causes the atoms and molecules to emit photons.
This kind of emission occurs in the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma-rays to visible light. Spectral lines are useful in studying the composition and temperature of a star, for example, because they contain absorption lines and emission lines, both characteristic of the elements that make up a particular star’s atmosphere.
Planets are also known to emit spectral lines. However, they typically produce them in different places than stars do. For example, some planets are so cool that they do not absorb or reflect the light they produce and therefore do not create absorption lines.
Another interesting kind of emission occurs in planetary nebulae. In these cases, certain kinds of electron transitions involve metastable energy levels. This is the reason why these spectra often contain forbidden lines.
When a star emits light, it can heat up a cloud of gas. This can cause the atoms in the gas to excite themselves, and then emit light at a particular wavelength. This can be done in a variety of ways, depending on the chemical nature of the gas and the temperature of the star.
This process produces a spectrum that shows stripes of color at specific wavelengths. This can be interpreted as a picture showing the stripes of colors or as a graph plotting the amount of light at each wavelength.
Position
One of the most important differences between stars and planets is their position in the Universe. Stars are essentially fixed on an arbitrary sphere that revolves around Earth, while planets move around the Sun. In order to understand what happens to celestial bodies in space, astronomers need accurate information about their positions.
The position of a star is based on two angular coordinates, right ascension (a) and declination (d), which are given for some epoch, e.g. 1950.0 or 2000. The RA is the apparent east-west position of a star measured from the prime meridian at Greenwich, England. The RA is also measured by hour angles, usually between 0 and 24 hours.
Astronomers use this information to measure the proper motion of stars across the sky, i.e., the amount of change in their angular position per year. They do this by using observations of transits of stars, which cross the field of view of telescope eyepieces due to Earth’s rotation.
Since stars are extremely far away, their position does not appear to change very much over time. However, if they were closer, they would likely change very quickly.
Another difference between stars and planets is their temperature. Stars have very high temperatures and can produce their own light. On the other hand, planets have relatively low temperatures and cannot produce their own light.
There are billions of stars in the Universe, but only a handful of planets. The most famous are Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth.
These are the inner planets, which orbit the Sun. There are a few more planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, that are further away from the Sun in their orbits.
Stars and planets are two very different types of heavenly bodies, but they share many similarities. Planets are larger than stars, and they have a large, thick atmosphere. They also have the ability to rotate, and some even have moons. Stars, on the other hand, are smaller and don’t have any natural satellites. The evolution of stars is different than the evolution of planets, with stars evolving from birth to death over billions of years while planets remain largely unchanged.