Publicatie datum
11 August 2025
From blue supergiant to red dwarf
In the new season our observatory's exhibition is about the great colour palette of our starry sky, from blue supergiant to red dwarf. We give beautiful examples of the different types of stars, how they form and how they meet their end. We also tell you in which constellation you can find these stars. We were often able to choose from stars that are already clearly visible to the naked eye. You will never look at the starry sky the same way again.
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
When you look at the sky you see that one star is brighter than another. Someone who looks very carefully at the stars also sees that some stars have a different colour. With telescopes you can study this much better, and the brightness and colour of millions of stars have been recorded in a diagram: the so-called Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. This famous diagram shows a pattern from which the entire life cycle of a star can be derived.
Today we know that our starry sky is strewn with the strangest stars. Some stars are enormously much larger than our sun, many others smaller. There are stars that are much hotter than our sun, but other stars much cooler. Still others resemble our sun and, like our sun, have planets.
