These constellations were first catalogued by the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE. Ptolemy did not name these constellations, but simply documented them in his Almagest.

HOW DID CONSTELLATIONS GET THEIR NAMES? Many of the constellations were named by ancient astronomers after things they thought the star patterns looked like?for example, a lion (Leo) or a swan (Cygnus), or a character who featured in their myths, such as the hero Hercules.

For most stars, their names come from a mix of Latin, Greek and Arabic terms. Many have more than one name or designation. Here’s how it all came about. About 1,900 years ago the Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (who was born under, and lived during, the Roman rule of Egypt) wrote the Almagest.

Hydra

Ophiuchus

Taurus the bull

According to Greek mythology, the constellation Taurus commemorates the god Zeus changing himself into a beautiful white Bull to win the affections of the Phoenician princess Europa. After Europa hopped onto the Bull’s back, the Bull swam across the Mediterranean Sea, taking Europa all the way to the island of Crete.

Sirius

The three largest constellations are gracing the evening skies. Hydra, the sea serpent; Virgo, the maiden; and Ursa Major, the big bear are visible in the night sky right now.

Constellations are useful because they can help people to recognize stars in the sky. By looking for patterns, the stars and locations can be much easier to spot. The constellations had uses in ancient times. They were used to help keep track of the calendar.

Astrology purports that astronomical bodies have influence on people’s lives beyond basic weather patterns, depending on their birth date. This claim is scientifically false. Numerous scientific studies have disproven that astronomical bodies affect people’s lives according to their birth date.

Alpha Centauri A

Stars do not really twinkle, they just appear to twinkle when seen from the surface of Earth. The stars twinkle in the night sky because of the effects of our atmosphere. When starlight enters our atmosphere it is affected by winds in the atmosphere and by areas with different temperatures and densities.

Stars die because they exhaust their nuclear fuel. Really massive stars use up their hydrogen fuel quickly, but are hot enough to fuse heavier elements such as helium and carbon. Once there is no fuel left, the star collapses and the outer layers explode as a ‘supernova’.

Massive Stars When a star is more than ten times as massive as the sun, it becomes a Supergiant star. Supergiants have the shortest lifespans of any star, as the temperatures in a supergiant’s core get so high that it is able to fuse the helium that is left over after hydrogen burning has stopped.

So the total lifespan of a star with the mass of the Sun is about 10 billion years. The smallest stars are the red dwarfs, these start at 50% the mass of the Sun, and can be as small as 7.5% the mass of the Sun.

The stars with the longest lifetimes are red dwarfs; some may be nearly as old as the universe itself.

• Red Dwarf Stars. Astronomers define a red dwarf as a star having between about 0.08 and 0.5 times the mass of the sun and formed primarily of hydrogen gas.
• Luminosity and Lifetime.
• Nuclear Fusion.
• Life Cycle of Stars.

No. Stars are born, live, and die. This process is called the “life cycle of a star”. Most of the time a star shines, it is in a stage of its life cycle called the main sequence.

R136a1. The star R136a1 currently holds the record as the most massive star known to exist in the universe. It’s more than 265 times the mass of our Sun, more than double most stars on this list.

3 Answers. To distinguish galaxies from stars, you can use the spectrum. Roughly, stars have a black-body like spectrum with features depending on the absorption and emission on the line of sight and in the chromosphere of the star. Galaxies on the other hand of a spectrum that is the composite of tons of stars.

So the smallest or least massive main sequence star is thought to be V 1581 Cygni C also known as GJ 1245 C. This tiny star is about 79 Jupiters in mass. It can be found in the incredibly interesting constellation of Cygnus.

That’s even hotter. But the hottest known stars in the Universe are the blue hypergiant stars. These are stars with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun. One of the best known examples is Eta Carinae, located about 7,500 light-years from the Sun.