English

History of the Observation of Stars

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2025-12-02 v4

Abstract

There are about 6000 stars, that can be seen with the naked eye and have been observed for centuries for various purposes. More modern investigations using advanced telescopes show that our Milky Way, a quite common galaxy, consists of about 100 -- 400 billion stars. And, it is estimated that there are between 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe -- all of them consist mostly of stars, and sending observable signals which also represents nothing more than a superposition of the light of individual stars. So we can conclude that the most common observable objects in the Universe are stars\textit{stars}. In this chapter, we focus on the long history of the observation of stars (compared to studies in other fields of science) to find out more about the nature of these objects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.11455,
  title  = {History of the Observation of Stars},
  author = {Andreas Schrimpf},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.11455},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This is a pre-print of a chapter for the Encyclopedia of Astrophysics (edited by I. Mandel, section editor F.R.N. Schneider) to be published by Elsevier as a Reference Module; 12 pages, 7 figures