Our Red Plastic Five Point Christmas Tree Star Toppers are 9 inches across and 9.5 inches tall. The red five pointed star Christmas tree toppers have a silver glitter center star with silver stars along the edge and a ½ inch wide solid red border. The five-pointed star red and silver tree topper is made of plastic. The five pointed Christmas star tree topper is identical on both the front and the back. There is a 2.5-inch red tube to attach the red and silver five pointed star tree toppers to your tree.
How Stars are used to Tell Directions.
The stars have always been used as guiding beacons in the sky. Since earliest times the North Star has helped sailors find their way across the trackless seas. Desert travelers have used stars to guide them. The Bible tells the beautiful story of the Star of Bethlehem that guided the Wise Men to the stable in Bethlehem where the baby Jesus lay in a manger. Even today, we use the stars to help guide our ships and airplanes.
How Far Away Are the Stars?
Imagine that our sun is the size of the dot at the end of this sentence. Then the next nearest star to us would be another small dot about 10 miles away. Other stars would be hundreds, thousands and hundreds of thousands of miles away.
Of the billions of stars in the heavens, only seventeen are within twelve light years of the earth. A light year is the distance that light, traveling 186,000 miles a second, will go in a year’s time. The big Hale telescope on Mount Palomar, California, has photographed groups of stars that are believed to be about 1,600 million light years away. A more powerful telescope would probably find stars even further away.
Select this link to view our Lighted Stars and Fiber Optic Angel Christmas Tree Toppers.
Movement of the Stars.
It is the motion of air that makes the stars seem to twinkle and it is the motion of the earth that makes the stars seem to rise in the east, move across the heavens and set in the west. This seeming daily motion of the stars is the result of the earth’s spinning around on its axis.
What seems to be another motion of the stars is also the result of the earth’s movements. You may have noticed that different star groups or constellations appear overhead at different seasons of the year. This is because the earth is rushing along in a great circle around the sun. So, at one time of the year, we look out at nighttime on one part of the heavens. Six months later, our earth has moved to the other side of the sun. Then we look out at nighttime on the other part of the heavens.
The stars, themselves, do move. Even our sun is rushing through space at a speed of about 43,000 miles an hour. We cannot see it go, however, because our earth and all the other planets are being carried right along with it.
All the stars in the universe seem to be rushing through space. And they all seem to be rushing away from each other, much as if they were dots of paint on a balloon that was being blown up. The farther away they are, the faster they seem to be moving.
Why Stars Shine.
Starlight comes to us from almost unbelievable distances. If your eyes are sharp, you can see the faint haze of a great group of stars, the Andromeda Nubula. This group is so far away that its light, which you now see, started from the stars almost two million years ago.
How can light travel for two million years to reach our eyes? Scientists think that he light is produce in the stars by the changing of hydrogen into helium. When this happens, a small amount of matter is destroyed. But the matter reappears as a tremendous amount of energy, the energy of light and of kinds of radiation that cannot be seen. All these radiations are streams of extremely tiny bullet like particles. Scientists call these particles photons. Photons or rays of light shoot out from the stars in all directions and vibrate or zigzag as they go. There is no air and practically nothing else out is space, so there is nothing to stop these speedy light bullets. They keep going and going until they hit some solid object like the earth. These zigzagging light bullets affect our eyes and we see a star.