# Tag Info

3

The gravitation of the stars in our galaxy keep the solar system in it. I'm not sure whether that's important for earth or for life on earth though, but it makes for nicer night skies. Gamma ray bursts, if close enough and (im)properly oriented, affect earth. A gamma ray event from a "soft gamma repeater", SGR 1900+14, is known to have affected earth's ...

1

The distant stars are also responsible for cosmic rays, which in turn can affect the Earth's weather

1

Machs principle, that inertia is caused by the distribution of distant stars was a principle that Einstein tried to incorporate into GR, but failed. However Barbour, quite recently incorporated an aspect of Machs principle into his theorising of time: ephemeris time An ephemeris gives the position of celestial bodies, and duration is deduced in terms of ...

6

The stars in our galactic neighbourhood do have a dynamical, gravitational effect on the inner workings of the solar system: They built the Oort cloud The Oort cloud is a roughly spherical cloud of icy bodies that is thought to act as a reservoir of long-period comets (and which we speculate exists to explain said comets' existence). These icy bodies ...

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The other answers talk about some of the effects. This is a complementary answer that attempts to put a number to the force behind one of the effects - gravitational attraction. Proxima Centuri is the closest star to our solar system. It is about 4 × 1016 m away and has a mass of 2.45 × 1029 kg. The mass of Earth is about 5.97 × 1024 kg. Plugging these ...

3

Gravitationally, there is little immediate effect on earth on a daily basis, though over very long periods of time, stars that pass near enough to the sun could disrupt the orbits of Oort cloud objects and send them towards the sun (and earth or other planets in our Solar System). Culturally, stars have a very big impact on our species. Religion, art, ...

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A lot (to put it mildly) of elements are created in stars and supernovae. These elements then travel through space until they fall to Earth (or, to be exact, some microscopic portion of them reach us). Earth itself wouldn't exist if stars hadn't generated elements which then clumped into dust, into minerals, and so on until a big ball of matter started to ...

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I don't think that light from the stars other than Sun is of much practical use nowadays except for the classic navigation, where it's essential of course. I guess any effect comes from the limitless reach of the gravitational force, which drops with the square of the distance but grows linearly with the mass exerting the force. A star most obviously ...

3

For a star to be turned into a black hole it needs some inward force compressing the matter. In nature this force is gravity, pulling the star's material inward. An additional compression occurs when the star's outer material bounces off of the dense core and is expelled outwards. This is the same type of process that happens during a core collapse ...

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While some galaxies are billions of light years away, there are hundreds of galaxies withing just a few dozen million light years away. Astronomically speaking, a few dozen million years is pretty brief. We can be fairly certain that the galaxy hasn't changed much in this time.

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We wouldn't be able to see it if a star went supernova right now because the light wouldn't have reached us yet. If a star 100 light years away from us went supernova 100 years ago we would see it now because the light would have had enough time to travel to us.

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Metallicity is irrelevant if the stellar gas cloud has enough mass when it begins to collapse. The Chandrasekhar limit gives the following limit; $$M_{limit} = \dfrac{\omega_{3}^{0}\sqrt{3\pi}}{2}\left(\dfrac{\hslash c}{G}\right)^{\frac{3}{2}}\dfrac{1}{\left(\mu_e m_H\right)^2} = 1.39 M_\odot$$ that can be applied to any composition of Fermi gases. The ...

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