1 THE SUN IS AN AVERAGE STAR
ur Sun is a middle-aged star that doesn’t seem remarkable in any way. It’s not particularly large or small – red giant stars are hundreds of times larger and red dwarfs are much smaller. The Sun seems to sit nicely in the middle of this range of sizes. Stars are not only classified by their size, though. The light they emit is also used, as this is easily measured. The Sun is a G-type star and has a surface temperature of around 6,000 Kelvin. This is where we start to see that this is not an average star, after all. In fact, 95 per cent of all the other stars that we see in the night sky are cooler than our Sun. Our star is in
