Look up into the sky on a clear night, and you’re likely to glimpse thousands of stars dotting the cosmos. Add a telescope into the mix, and suddenly millions more come into view .
The Milky Way is brimming with an estimated hundred billions stars, giant balls of hot gas , including our galaxy’s most famous – the sun. But outside of our home galaxy? The number of stars is near unfathomable.
Yet getting a handle on observing stars, which form in large molecular clouds of gas and dust, is crucial to better understand not only how they evolve, but how our universe grows and changes with them, astronomers say.
To do that, what’s the harm of adding just one more “star” to the mix – even if it’s a humanmade one?
In a $19.5 million NASA-funded mission, researchers at George Mason University are heading a project to construct and eventually launch a small satellite into space. Once in orbit, the contraption will be far enough away to look like a star to telescopes back on Earth.
The satellite will then begin the work of helping researchers study star brightness to gain more precise estimates of their size, scale and age. By doing so, the researchers hope to uncover fresh clues about how fast the universe is expanding and, just maybe, whether life could exist anywhere else in the universe.