Stars — Distant Suns
Every star you see in the night sky is actually a sun — a giant ball of hot glowing gas, just like our own sun. They look like tiny dots because they are incredibly far away.
Our nearest star neighbor (after the sun) is Proxima Centauri, about 4.24 light-years away. That means light from Proxima Centauri takes over four years to reach us, even though light travels at 186,000 miles per second!
Stars come in different colors depending on their temperature. Blue stars are the hottest (around 45,000°F). White stars are next. Yellow stars like our sun are medium (about 10,000°F). Orange and red stars are cooler (relatively speaking — 'cool' stars are still thousands of degrees!).
Stars twinkle because their light passes through Earth's atmosphere. As the light travels through moving pockets of warm and cool air, it bends back and forth, making the star appear to shimmer. If you were in space, stars would not twinkle at all — they would be steady points of light.
**Fun Fact:** There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth! Scientists estimate at least 200 billion trillion stars.