8 amazing facts about stars

Can we tell if the stars we see have died?

Stars take millions or billions of years to move through their life cycles, but the light from stars in our galaxy usually spends a few thousand years at most travelling to Earth. On the law of averages, then, it’s pretty unlikely that a star will have died in the intervening time, but there are some exceptions, eg Eta Carinae might have already exploded.

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