ST Dragon wrote:
By the way, what is it that gives to all these stars their distinctive colours (Yellow, white, blue, Orange, purple, etc…)?
Do all main sequence stars (like our sun) which fuse hydrogen in to helium, always have this yellow colour? Is the colour of a star defined by the stage / phase of their life that they’re in?
Are there any other main sequence stars like our sun with a red, orange, white, blue, purple, colour, etc…other than yellow? Or is it only stars which have used up all their hydrogen fuel and have began fusing helium that their colour changes from yellow to something else?
And is there a star with Green colour?
Been close to a decade since I took any sort of decent science class that covered this stuff, so I'm just shooting from the hip here. Might be someone more qualified to fix/expand upon this. The colors of stars are a function of the temperature at which they're burning--sorta like how the hottest part of a match is the blue bit at the bottom of the flame. Blue is the color of the youngest and hottest stars. As they expand and cool, they run white-yellow-orange-red. Of course, observing them from Earth might add some other colors to the mix due to atmospheric distortion, pollution in the air, etc. Since they 'burn' through hydrogen fusion, you're generally not going to get funky colors like green.
Of course, dumping all manner of garbage and crap in a campfire always made green flames, so maybe if one were to get a huge amount of space trash...
EDIT: D'oh, looks like moozooh beat me to a Wikipedia link that covers the color bit.
