1000 Things You Should Know About Space

Small stars

* Small stars of low brightness are called white, red or black dwarves depending on their colour.

* Red dwarves are bigger than the planet Jupiter but smaller than our medium-sized star, the Sun. They glow faintly, with 0.01% of Sun's brightness.

* No red dwarf can be seen with the naked eye-not even the nearest star to the Sun, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri.

* White dwarves are the last stage in the life of medium-sized star. Although they are even smaller than red dwarves-no bigger than the Earth-they contain the same amountof matter as the Sun.

* Our night sky's brightest star, Sirius, the Dog Star, has a white dwarf companion called the Pup Star.

* Black dwarves are stars that were either not big enough to start shining,or which have burned up all their nuclear fuel and stopped glowing, like a coal cinder.

* The white dwarf Omicron-2 Eridani(also called 40 Eridani) is one of a few drwarf stars that can be seen from the Earth with the naked eye.

* Brown Dwarves are very cool space objects, little bigger than Jupiter.

* Brown dwarves formed in the same way as other stars, but were not big enough to start shining properly. They just glow very faintly with the heat left over from their formation.

* Black dwarves are very small, cold, dead stars.

* The smallest kind of star is called a neutron star.