Stars, such as our sun, are giant balls of gas held together by gravity.
During this phase, stars radiate that heat, shining brightly like our sun, mostly at optical wavelengths.
It might be the fact that he meant that our Sun is a second generation star.
By comparison, Mercury orbits our Sun at a distance between 29 million and 43 million miles.
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Of course, let's not forget the obvious: "Our Gold Coast accounts for our sun, too, " she says.
The telescope was pointed at a young star, HD 100546, about 2.5-times the size of our sun.
Scientists have recorded the sound of three stars similar to our Sun using France's Corot space telescope.
The planet orbits a star about half as big as our Sun, positioned some 9, 000 light-years away.
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These would have been made around the stars that were the ancestors of our Sun, Dr Russell said.
Previously observed giants had been seen to get as big as 150 times the mass of our Sun.
Dr. SCHAWINSKI: And so our sun is at least a second generation, if not the third generation star.
White dwarves are no longer capable of the nuclear fusion that sustains our Sun and most other stars.
The telescope was pointed at a young star, HD 100546, which is about 2.5-times the size our sun.
It is colossal, 2.5 million times heavier than our Sun but crammed into a small region of space.
In this system, one star is slightly bigger than our sun, and the other star is slightly smaller.
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Astronomers believe that in a billion years from now our Sun will be over 10% brighter than it is today.
There are so far about 1, 000 candidate galaxies, some of which can out-shine our Sun by a factor of 100 trillion.
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In contrast, the third Earth-like planet, Kepler 69c, orbits a star very similar to our sun (that is, hotter than Kepler 62).
The planet's host star is dimmer and cooler than our sun, but the planet is also 15% closer than we are to the sun.
The researchers estimate that the two light sources come from black holes between 20 million and one billion times more massive than our Sun.
The host star is about a billion years older than our Sun, so it is intriguing to speculate about whether life might inhabit these planets.
Since Kepler 62 is a cooler star than our sun, planets can orbit closer to it than the Earth can to our sun before overheating.
Our sun does not orbit another star, but roughly half of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy do, as part of a binary system.
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Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a colossal black hole at its core, too, which is some three million times the mass of our Sun.
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Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, the cluster was nicknamed "El Gordo" - "the Fat One" in Spanish.
Kepler-37b is a tad larger than our heavenly dance partner, the Moon, and whizzes round a star much like our Sun, with two larger planets in its system for company.
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Measuring at two-thirds the size of our sun, this cosmic lantern is orbited by a total of five planets, three of which are too close to be habitable for life.
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These early structures are "supermassive" -- perhaps millions of times the mass of our sun -- and most of the light around them doesn't make it out of their galaxies, Schawinski said.
Our sun is enriched with heavy elements, with metals, and oxygen, and so forth, that have to have been made inside another star that died before our sun and our solar system formed.
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