How does a planet differ from a star?
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A planet is a celestial body that has its own gravity. It revolves around the sun and revolves in an elliptical path with a short period of revolution. A star on the other hand, is a celestial body that generates energy by converting hydrogen into helium and shines by emitting light. The bigger the mass of a star, the more it emits light and produces heat or radiation.
Stars are known to have higher temperatures than planets but this doesn’t mean that they emit as much heat as planets do. There are many types of stars such as red dwarfs, white dwarfs, yellow dwarves, brown dwarfs etc. which may or may not be habitable for life forms like us.
I think both are very important because we can live on planets and there might be other forms of life out there too! If you look at pictures of exoplanets you will see some that have rings like Saturn’s rings whereas others have no rings at all. So I think we should keep an open mind about what exists in space! Thanks for reading 🙂
A planet is a celestial body that orbits a star. It can be visible to the naked eye, or it can be seen only through a telescope.
A star is the center of an atom and contains its mass and energy. A star shines because nuclear fusion in its core generates energy. The larger the mass of the star, the more energy it produces.
In general, stars are classified according to their surface temperature: hot stars have temperatures higher than 5000 degrees Celsius (10,000 degrees Fahrenheit), while cooler stars are below 3000 degrees Celsius (5000 degrees Fahrenheit).
Stars range from small red dwarfs with masses less than 0.08 times that of our Sun up to giant white ones with masses between 1 and 8 solar masses (1–8 Suns).
Stars vary greatly in size; for example Proxima Centauri is smaller than our Sun but much more massive at around 2.5 solar masses (2 Suns). By comparison, Earth’s mass is about 5% that of our Sun and our diameter is only 6% as large as that of Proxima Centauri.