Are there stars hotter than the sun

Scientists have found a hellish world where the "surface" of the planet is over 4,C - almost as hot as our Sun. KELT-9b takes just two days to complete one orbit of the star. Being so close means the planet cannot exist for very long - the gases in its atmosphere are being blasted with radiation and lost to space.

Researchers say it may look a little like a comet as it circles the star from pole to pole - another strange aspect of this discovery. Its highly unusual properties were also presented on Monday to the spring meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.

The planet is tidally locked to its star, meaning it always presents the same face - just as our Moon never shows its far side to Earth. Just for comparison, our Sun, which actually looks white from space, measures about 6, Kelvin. The hotter the star, the further up the spectrum you go. The hottest stars are the blue stars.

A star appears blue once its surface temperature gets above 10, Kelvin, or so, a star will appear blue to our eyes. So the question is, how massive can stars get? One example is the star Rigel, in the constellation Orion. These tiny, yet incredibly heavy objects can suck up gas and dust around them, creating a lot of heat - sometimes temperatures in the millions of degrees. Two neutron stars can fuse together to become one, in an event called a kilonova , and that makes things very hot too — million of degrees.

Stars shine because they are hot, and so they light up the night sky in a beautiful way. Lots of heat is also made by stars as they shine, and especially when a star dies in a supernova, or a kilonova occurs. The amazing thing is that this heat also makes new atoms — tiny particles that have made their way long ago from stars to us. Atoms are like building blocks — everything in your life, even your own body, is made of atoms. Lots of different atoms made by far away stars have found their way here, to make up the Earth, Moon, the Sun and you.

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