bla bla some intro to catch your interest
Not only humans, animals and plants have a life cycle,
so does stars. When a star reaches its final stage of
their cycle it can go one out of two paths. Which path
the star takes depends on different factors, one of them
being size. When a star has a mass that is larger than 8M
(solar masses), it is a massive star. These stars become
either black holes or neutron stars at the end of their
cycle, whereas a star with less than 8M becomes a white
dwarf.
When the neutron star is formed it has a mass of about
1.4M (solar masses) but yet its small size it has a density
of 10^17 kg/m^3 which is a density that is even greater
than that of black holes!
Proxima Centauri is the star, latest to be discovered, that has the smallest distance from the sun. It is located about 4.22 light years away from the sun. The distance can be measured in different ways. Trigonometric parallax is one of them. The issue with this one is that it is only useful and accurate as long as the star is only a couple of thousand light years away. How this is used is that two points on opposite sides of the orbit of the earth means they are six months apart from each other. By using this as a baseline, you can measure the distance to the star of the parallactic angle, p. if p=1” (1 arcsec). What parallax means is basically the change that a nearby object has made when it has moved while being viewed from two different positions. An object’s position will change depending on the angle you view it from. An easy experiment you can do to test this is putting your finger on your nose and closing one eye at a time. Your finger will then appear to be moving even though you’re holding it completely still.