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What are stars made of? Can we rearrange them?
Question Date: 2005-12-06
Answer 1:

There was a page from caltech cosmic_kids which explained a lot about stars, unfortunately it is not longer available. However from there I took information in order to write the following answer in which I am trying to explain you a bit more on the topic.

Stars are made of very hot gas. We can say that they are big exploding balls of mostly hydrogen and helium, which are the two lightest elements.

Stars shine by burning hydrogen into helium in their cores, and later in their lives create heavier elements. Most stars have small amounts of heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and iron, which were created by stars that existed before them.

After a star runs out of fuel, it ejects much of its material back into space. New stars are formed from this material, so the material in stars is recycled.

Our nearest star, the Sun, is so hot that the huge amount of hydrogen is undergoing a constant star-wide nuclear reaction, like in a hydrogen bomb. Even though it is constantly exploding in a nuclear reaction, the Sun and other stars are so large and have so much matter in them that it will take billions of years for the explosion to use all the "fuel" in the star.

We can not rearrange the stars. There are tremendously big forces from the universe that put the stars in the places where they are located.



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