what do stars look like?
What do stars look like?
A lot like our Sun, but with many interesting differences and of course colour changes. Since the early 1980's, astronomers have developed methods that allow them to see the surfaces of many nearby stars, and of more distant red super giant stars like Betelgeuse. The large stars have very large sunspots - as big as our Sun and larger! while smaller stars like our Sun seem to have magnetic fields threading their outer layers. The sunspots come and go in decade-long cycles like our Sun. Of course the temperatures for stars are different, but that seems only to affect the 'colour' of the star's surface. So long as the outer layers are convecting like boiling oatmeal, this activity seems to be enough to kick up the same kinds of phenomena we see on the Sun including prominences and flares. There are stars like Vega that probably doesn’t have convection zones near the surface. These stars will probably have very bland surfaces containing a few very large convection cells, but with little if any small-scale features.