I was just staring at the night sky, trying to be all mellow (lol), when I randomly thought about this. I know the Sun is a star, but I realized I didn’t know if the Moon is a star too. Is it?
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I was just staring at the night sky, trying to be all mellow (lol), when I randomly thought about this. I know the Sun is a star, but I realized I didn’t know if the Moon is a star too. Is it?
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word “star” as “any one of the objects in space that are made of burning gas and that look like points of light in the night sky.” Stars are also bigger than planets – Sol, our sun is 109 times bigger than the Earth, and it’s considered an average-sized star.
Basically, stars are made of very hot gas and are massive in size – and our moon, sometimes called Luna or Selene, is solid and small. For visualization, you can fit 64.3 million moons inside the sun.
The moon is classified as a natural satellite. A natural satellite is any celestial body in space that orbits around a larger body – for Selene, it’s Earth.
So yeah, although the moon can appear yellow and look like the sun or a star sometimes – they’re not the same.
Sources:
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/is-the-moon-a-planet-or-a-star.html
https://theconversation.com/how-big-is-the-moon-let-me-compare-118840#:~:text=The%20equatorial%20diameter%20of%20the%20Sun%20is%20almost%201.4%20million,the%20diameter%20of%20the%20Moon.