I Can’t Sleep - Stars | Calm Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

Drift off with calm bedtime reading about stars to ease insomnia and restless nights. This soothing episode explores the life cycle of stars, from their fiery beginnings in nebulae to their brilliant light across the night sky. Benjamin’s gentle cadence makes astronomy peaceful, guiding you through constellations, star types, and their importance in history and science. With no whispering or hypnosis—just calm, fact-filled storytelling—you’ll feel your mind unwind, stress fade, and rest arrive naturally. Press play, imagine the stars above, and drift into deep, peaceful sleep. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Star, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Star. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch.

I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause. With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, and become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles to pour you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma, held together by its own gravity.

The nearest star to Earth is the sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance. from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, the brightest of which gained proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogs that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. However, most of the estimated 300-6tillion stars in the years of the year, universe are invisible to the naked eye from Earth, including all stars outside our galaxy,

the Milky Way. For at least a portion of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime. And for some stars by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity, chemical composition, and many other properties of a star by observing its motion

through space, its luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the main factor that determines its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities produces a plot known as a H.R. diagram. H.R. diagram. Plotting a particular star on that diagram allows the age and evolution

stage of that star to be determined. A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a gaseous nebula of material composed primarily of hydrogen, along with helium, and trace amounts of heavier elements. When the stellar core is sufficiently dense, hydrogen becomes steadily converted into helium through nuclear fusion, releasing energy in the process. The remainder of the star's interior carries energy away from the core through a combination of radiative and convective heat transfer processes. The star's internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own gravity. A star with mass greater, than 0.4 times the suns will expand to become a red giant when the hydrogen fuel in its core is

exhausted. In some cases, it will fuse heavier elements at the core or in shells around the core. As the star expands, it throws a part of its mass enriched with those heavier elements. into the interstellar environment, to be recycled later as new stars. Meanwhile, the core becomes a stellar remnant, a white dwarf, a neutron star, or, if it is sufficiently massive, a black hole. Binary and multi-star systems consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound and generally move around each other in stable orbits. When two such stars have a relatively close orbit, their gravitational interaction can

have a significant impact on their evolution. Stars can form part of a much large, larger gravitationally bound structure, such as a star cluster or a galaxy. Observation history. Historically, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world. They have been part of religious practices and used for celestial navigation and orientation. Many ancient astronomers believed that stars were permanently affixed to a heavenly sphere and that they were immutable. By convention, astronomers grouped stars into constellations

and used them to track the motions of the planets and the inferred position of the sun. The motion of the sun against the background stars, and the horizon was used to create calendars, which could be used to regulate agricultural practices. The Gregorian calendar currently used nearly everywhere in the world is a solar calendar based on the angle of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its local star, the sun. The oldest accurately dated star chart was the result of ancient Egyptian astronomy in 1534 BC. The earliest known star catalogs were compiled by the ancient Babylonian astronomers of Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC during the Casset period, circa 1531 to 1155 BC. The first star catalog in Greek astronomy was created by Aristolus in approximately 300 BC, with the help of Democeros.

The star catalog of Hipparchus, 2nd century BC, included 120 stars, and was used to assemble Ptolemy's star catalog. Hipparchus is known for the discovery of the first recorded Nova, New Star. Many of the constellations and star names in use today derive from Greek astronomy. In spite of the apparent immutability of the heavens, Chinese astronomers were aware that new stars could appear. In 185 AD, they were the first to observe and write about a supernova, now known as the SN-185. The brightest stellar event in recorded history was the SN106 supernova, which was observed in 1006 and written about by the Egyptian astronomer Ali Ibn Ridwan and several Chinese astronomers. The SN1054 supernova, which gave birth to the Crab Nebula, was also observed by Chinese and Islamic astronomers.

medieval Islamic astronomers gave Arabic names to many stars that are still used today, and they invented numerous astronomical instruments that could compute the position of the stars. They built the first large observatory research institutes, mainly for the purpose of producing Zieg Star catalogs. Among these, the first large observatory research institutes, the book of fixed stars, 964, was written by the Persian astronomer

Abd al-Raman al-Sufi, who observed a number of stars, star clusters, including the Amacron Volurum and Barakis clusters, and galaxies, including the Andromeda Galaxy. According to A. Zahur,

in the 11th century. The Persian polymath scholar Abu Raiyan Biruni described the Milky Way galaxy as a multitude of fragments having the properties of nebulous stars and also gave the latitudes of various stars during a lunar eclipse in 2019. According to Joseph,

Pug, the Andalusian astronomer Ibn Baja, proposed that the Milky Way was made up of many stars that almost touched one another and appeared to be a continuous image due to the effect of refraction from sublinary material. citing his observation of the conjunction of Jupiter and Mars on 500A.H. 1106-117 AD as evidence. Early European astronomers such as Tycho Bray identified new stars in the night sky, later termed Nove, suggesting that the heavens were not immutable. In 1584, Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars were like the sun and may have other planets, possibly even Earth-like, in orbit around them,

an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers, democratous and epicurus, and by medieval Islamic cosmologists, such as Fokr al-Din-Azzi. By the following century, the idea of the stars being the same as the sun was reaching a consensus among astronomers. To explain why these stars exerted no-net gravitational pull on the solar system, Isaac Newton suggested that the stars were equally distributed in every direction, an idea prompted by the theologian Richard Bentley. The Italian astronomer Jiminiano Montanari recorded observing variations in luminosity of the star Algol in 1667. Edmund Halley published the first.

measurements of the proper motion of a pair of nearby fixed stars, demonstrating that they had changed positions since the time of the ancient Greek astronomers, Ptolemy and Hipparchus. William Herschel was the first astronomy to attempt to determine the distribution of stars in the sky. During the 1780s, he established a series of gauges in 600 directions. and counted the stars observed along each line of sight. From this, he deduced that the number of stars steadily increased toward one side of the sky in the direction of the Milky Way core. His son John Herschel repeated this study in the southern hemisphere

and found a corresponding increase in the same direction. In addition to his other accomplishments, William Herschel is also noted for his discovery that some stars do not merely lie along the same line of sight, but are also physical companions that form binary star systems. The science of stellar spectroscopy was pioneered by Joseph von Fraunhofer and Angelo Setchi. By comparing the spectra of stars such as Sirius to the Sun,

they found differences in the strength and number of their absorption lines, the dark lines in stellar spectra caused by the atmosphere's absorption of specific frequencies. In 1865, SETI began classifying stars in spectral types. However, the modern version of the stellar classification scheme was developed by Annie J. Cannon during the 1900s. The first direct measurement of the distance of a star, 61 sine ye, at 11.4 light years, was made in 1838 by Friedrich Bessel, using the parallax technique. Parallax measurements demonstrated the vast separation of the stars in the heavens. Observation of double stars gained increasing importance during the 19th century. In 1834, Frederick Bessel observed changes in the proper motion of the star serious

and inferred a hidden companion. Edward Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic bin. in 1890 when he observed the periodic splitting of the spectral lines of the star Miser in a 104-day period. Detailed observations of many binary star systems were collected by astronomers, such as Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Strauva and S. W. Burnham, allowing the masses of stars to be determined from the computation of orbital elements. The first solution to the problem of deriving an orbit of binary stars from telescope observations was made by Felix Savory in 1827.

The 20th century saw increasingly rapid advances in the scientific study of stars. The photograph became a... valuable astronomical tool. Carl Schwartzschild discovered that the color of a star and hence its temperature could be determined by comparing the visual magnitude against the photographic magnitude. The development of the photoelectric photometer allowed precise measurements of magnitude at multiple wavelength intervals. In 1921, Albert A. Mickelson made the first measurements of a stiller diameter, using an interferometer on the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. Important theoretical work on the physical structure of stars occurred during the first

decades of the 20th century. In 1913, the Hertzprung-Russle diagram was developed, propelling the astrophysical study of stars. Successful models were developed to explain the interiors of stars in stellar evolution. Chichelia Payne-Kepoxkin first proposed that stars were made primarily of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 PhD thesis. The spectra of stars were further understood through advances in quantum, physics. This allowed the chemical composition of the stellar atmosphere to be determined. With the exception of supernovae, individual stars have primarily been observed in the local group, and especially in the visible part of the Milky Way, as demonstrated by the detailed star

catalogs available for our galaxy. But some stars have been observed in the M-100 galaxy of the Virgo cluster, about 100 million light years from the Earth. In the local supercluster, it is possible to see star clusters, and current telescopes could, in principle, observe faint individual stars in the local group. However, outside the local cluster of galaxies, neither individual stars nor clusters of stars have been observed. The only exception is a faint image of a large star cluster containing hundreds of thousands of stars located at a distance of one billion light years,

ten times further than most distant star cluster previously observed. In February 2018, astronomers reported for the first time a signal of the re-ionization epic, an indirect detection of light from the earliest stars formed, about 180 million years after the Big Bang. In April 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distant ordinary, i.e. main sequence star named Icarus, formerly M-ACS-J-1149. Lensend Star 1 at 9 billion light years away from Earth. In May 2018, astronomers reported the detection of the most distinct oxygen ever detected in the universe

and the most distant galaxy ever observed by Atacama large military array, or the very large telescope. With the team inferring that the signal was emitted 13.3 billion years ago, or 500 years after the Big Bang. They found that the observed brightness of the galaxy is well explained by a model where the onset of star formation corresponds to only 250 million years after the universe began, corresponding to a red shift of about 15.