Science: Our Sun is NOT NORMAL. It’s quite strange…
[Virtually everything about life on Earth is NOT normal. I will return to this. It's creepier than you can imagine. There are lots of images and charts at the source link below. Jan]
The Sun isn’t a typical star in the Universe
Most of us have heard that the Sun is an ordinary, typical, unremarkable star. But science shows we’re actually anything but average.
This fragment of the young star-forming region NGC 2014 showcases many stars that are bluer, more massive, and much shorter lived than our Sun. However, the fainter, redder, less luminous stars are far more numerous, making us wonder just what "typical" truly is for a star.(Credit: NASA, ESA and STScI)
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Most of us have heard that among all the stars in the Universe, the Sun is simply typical: unremarkable in every way. But when we look at the stars that actually exist within the Universe, we find that the Sun is an outlier in many, many ways. How does the Sun actually compare to the "average" or "typical" star in the Universe? The answers may surprise you.
Since time immemorial, we’ve wondered, “Is the Sun just a typical star?”
From their earliest beginnings to their final extent before fading away, Sun-like stars will grow from their present size to the size of a red giant (~the Earth’s orbit) to up to ~5 light-years in diameter, typically. The largest known planetary nebulae can reach approximately double that size, up to ~10 light-years across, but none of this necessarily means that the Sun is a typical, average star.
In the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens estimated the distance to Sirius, assuming it was a distant, Sun-like star.
Sirius A and B, a bluer and brighter star than our Sun and a white dwarf star, respectively, as imaged by the Hubble space telescope. Sirius A is the brightest star in the sky, but early estimates of its distance were low, as they didn’t account for the fact that Sirius is about ~20 times as intrinsically bright as our Sun.
The (modern) Morgan–Keenan spectral classification system, with the temperature range of each star class shown above it, in kelvin. The overwhelming majority (80%) of stars today are M-class stars, with only 1-in-800 being an O-class or B-class star massive enough for a core-collapse supernova. Our Sun is a G-class star, unremarkable but brighter than all but ~5% of stars. Only about half of all stars exist in isolation; the other half are bound up in multi-star systems.
Stars come with a variety of properties: mass, color, temperature, ionization, metallicity, age, etc.
This portion of the Hubble image of Arp 143 showcases the new stars (in blue) formed as a result from gas stripping, heating, and shocking in the space between the two main galaxy members. Stars have been forming throughout the Universe over the past 13.6 billion years or so, but the ones that survive today weren’t formed evenly or under the same conditions over all of cosmic history.
Although the Sun isn’t a unique cosmic outlier, it isn’t exactly typical, either.
Over the course of 50 days, with a total of over 2 million seconds of total observing time (the equivalent of 23 complete days), the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) was constructed from a portion of the prior Hubble Ultra Deep Field image. Combining light from ultraviolet through visible light and out to Hubble’s near-infrared limit, the XDF represented humanity’s deepest view of the cosmos: a record that stood until it was broken by JWST. In the red box, where no galaxies are seen by Hubble, the JWST’s JADES survey revealed the most distant galaxy to date: JADES-GS-z13-0. Extrapolating beyond what we see to what we know and expect must exist, we infer a total of ~2 sextillion stars within the observable Universe.
With around two sextillion (~2 × 1021) stars within the observable Universe, how do we compare?
how many stars
The star-formation rate in the Universe as a function of redshift, which is itself a function of cosmic time. The overall rate, (left) is derived from both ultraviolet and infrared observations, and is remarkably consistent across time and space. Note that star formation, today, is only a few percent of what it was at its peak, and that the overwhelming majority of stars were formed in the first ~4-5 billion years of our cosmic history. Only about ~15% of all stars, at maximum, have formed over the past 4.6 billion years.
Most stars that exist today formed long ago: ~11 billion years in the past.
Our Sun, born 4.6 billion years ago, is younger than 85% of all stars.
Galaxies comparable to the present-day Milky Way are numerous throughout cosmic time, having grown in mass and with more evolved structure at present. Younger galaxies are inherently smaller, bluer, more chaotic, richer in gas, and have lower densities of heavy elements than their modern-day counterparts, and their star-formation histories evolve over time. Most of the stars in the Universe were disproportionately formed long ago, rather than relatively recently.
The majority of stars are red dwarfs: cool, low in mass, and extremely long lived.
Our Sun, a G-class star, is more massive than 95% of stars.
Most stars are lower than ours in metallicity: the fraction of heavy elements present.
Our Sun has greater enrichment than ~93% of all stars.
Only half of all stars are “singlets” like our Sun; the other half exist within multi-star systems.
Although planets have been found in trinary systems before in recent years, most of them orbit either close in to a single star or in intermediate orbits around a central binary, with the third star much farther away. GW Orionis is the first candidate system to have a planet orbiting all three stars at once. About 35% of all stars are in binary systems and another 10% are in trinary systems; only about half of stars are singlets like our Sun.
We’re not typically luminous, either.
When a star-forming region becomes so large that it extends over an entire galaxy, that galaxy becomes a starburst galaxy. Here, Henize 2-10 is shown evolving toward that state, with young stars in many locations and active stellar nurseries in numerous locations galaxy-wide. If we were to count the number of stars within the galaxy and multiply that number by the Sun’s light-to-mass ratio, we’d underestimate the total flux by about a 3-to-1 ratio.
The overall luminosity-to-mass ratio of stars is three times our own.
Brown dwarfs, between about 0.013-0.080 solar masses, will fuse deuterium+deuterium into helium-3 or tritium, remaining at the same approximate size as Jupiter but achieving much greater masses. Red dwarfs are only slightly larger, but even the Sun-like star shown here is not shown to scale here; it would have about 7 times the diameter of a low-mass star.
Normal, apparently, encompasses an enormous range.