Our Star of Bethlehem LED Christmas Tree Topper is 11.25 inches tall and 7.5 inches wide. The star of Bethlehem LED star tree topper is clear plastic with LED’s on the inside. The LED lights change between five different colors continuously. The LED Christmas star tree topper will save you money on you electric bill since it does not use as much electricity as normal tree toppers. The LED star topper trees has a green detachable base to mount the LED start tree topper on your tree. The removable base is 4.5 inches tall with a 3 inch space for the tree top. The LED star of Bethlehem christmas tree topper fits securely in the top of the base. For indoor use only. Complete use and care instructions are included.
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How Many Stars Are There?
Nobody know how many stars there are. Even on a clear night, you probably can see only about 2,000 stars with the naked eye. That is partly because you can see only the stars that are overhead in your part of the earth. The curve of the earth and the thickness of the atmosphere above you both cut down the number of stars that you can see. But the main reason you cannot see more is that many of the stars are so far away that their light is too dim to be seen with the naked eye. The great glass eyes of the telescopes can see much dimmer light than your eyes can see. A telescope with a mirror eye that is 100 inches across could see a burning candle about 6,800 miles away.
The great Hale telescope at Mount Palomar in California collects starlight on a mirror that is 200 inches across. It can gather a million times more light than your eyes can. With such large telescopes, astronomers can photograph over thirty billion stars. We think there must be billions more beyond the reach of our most powerful telescopes.
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.
How Large Are the Stars?
Most of the stars seem to be about the size of our sun, which has a diameter of 865,000 miles. There are tiny stars, called white dwarfs, which are only about 17,000 miles in diameter. There is also one super giant, which is more than two billion, four hundred million miles across. This star is so big that our sun, together with the earth at its distance of about 93 million miles from the sun could be placed twenty five times in a row across the middle of the super giant.
Stars differ as greatly in weight as they do in size. The tiny white dwarfs are amazingly heavy. A cubic inch of a dwarf star might weigh several tons. On the other hand, a cubic foot of a super giant might weigh less than 1/1000 of an ounce.
What Are Stars Made Of?
Stars are very hot masses of gas. They seem to be made of about the same elements as those we find in the earth. These elements are not in the same proportions as they are in the earth. Stars differ in the proportions of the elements they contain, too, but, in general, the lighter elements are the most common in all the stars. Hydrogen, helium, calcium and iron are the most common and a large amount of carbon is found in some stars.
We study the light from a star to find what it is made of. This light tells us only about the elements that are at or near the surface. We do not know much about what stars are like inside.