How do scientists know what stars are made of?
Stars are unimaginably far away and we can never visit them. Yet scientists confidently say stars are made of hydrogen and helium and other elements. How could anyone know what a star is made of from such a distance? What technique reveals the composition of something light-years away?
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There's a great explanation of this on the HowStuffWorks website, and the NASA site has good material too if it's space-related. Both are written for normal people, not scientists, so you won't get lost in jargon.
3 Answers
There's a great explanation of this on the HowStuffWorks website, and the NASA site has good material too if it's space-related. Both are written for normal people, not scientists, so you won't get lost in jargon.
The math looks scary but it's mostly just a precise way of saying something you can understand in plain English. Once you get the concept, the equations are just bookkeeping. Focus on the idea first, the symbols second.
I teach high school science and I get this question every year. The textbook explanation is a simplification — a useful one, but a simplification. The real answer involves stuff you'd cover in a college course, but I can give you the gist.
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