What is a star on the sky?
Points of light that you can see in the sky that twinkle are stars like our sun. There are five points of light that do not twinkle, but give a steady uninterrupted beam (they present a small disc to the eye) these are the nearest 5 planets to us: Venus Mars Jupiter Saturn and Mercury. The other two planets Uranus (found in 1781) and Neptune (found in 1846) were not known about till we developed telescopes, as they are not visible to the unaided eye but can be seen with a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope. All planets reflect light from the nearest star and do not create light themselves. Planets in other solar systems (of which we have discovered 200 or so since 1992) reflect the light of the stars they orbit but we cannot see that with the unaided eye, given the distance away and how dim that light is. Most stars are what are called Main Sequence stars and they are hot balls of hydrogen that they convert to helium by nuclear fusion with a loss of mass and a release of ener
