Why do stars have different colours?

Stars all look the same colour, don’t they? That’s true if you see them with the naked eye. Through a telescope the picture changes. Once you look at stars when they are magnified, you see that they all have different colours.

Surface temperature controls the colour of a star. Our most familiar one is the sun. That has a surface temperature of around 5000  and is yellow-white in colour. There are plenty of stars in the universe far hotter than the sun. The hottest are twice as hot on the surface, and these are blue. Surprisingly, red stars are the coolest ones. The surface temperature on these is about 3000 . Knowing this, scientists are able to estimate the surface temperature of stars by carefully measuring their colours.

 

Picture Credit : Google

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