These star tables and some of the comments were sent to us by Gerald Nordley, science fiction writer, member of the CONTACT group, and a very good friend to world builders! Thank you very much for your help, Mr Nordley!

This is a basic star table. More information is available here.

Notes on these star tables:

The stars in these tables are arranged in the classes used in the Main Sequence. Choose your star from these tables and you will have some of the numbers that you need for your solar system and your planet.

Our sun is a G2 star. As we found out from our hands-on activity, our sun formed 4.5 billion years ago. Earth also formed about 4.5 billion years ago, and 3.2 billion years ago, or perhaps even earlier, the first single celled life forms appeared. When you consider that the earth had to cool from a molten state first, life seems to have appeared quite quickly. However, the jump to multicellular life forms took a long time. Multicellular life forms began to develop only 600 million years. If you want to have life forms that you can actually see, you need to choose a star with a long enough life time.

You should choose your star type from these tables. Write down the information about that star's row, with the headings.

What the Headings mean:

Class: See the page on Main Sequence

Temperature in Degrees Kelvin:

See page on Temperatures in Space. The temperature given is the surface temperature of the star.

Visual Luminosity:

in terms of our sun, Sol, at the same distance. For hotter or cooler stars this is less than our sun, because much of those stars' radiation is in the invisible ultraviolet (very hot) or infrared (warm) part of the spectrum. If one so close to a red dwarf that it appeared as bright as the sun, one would get about 100 times less ultraviolet intensity.

Mass (Mass of our sun = 1): See page on Weight, Mass, and Density.

Radius:

Radii are estimated from temperature and luminosity, except for the planets at the bottom of this table. The radius is the distance from the center of the star to its surface.

Terrestrial Equivalent Orbit in AUs:

the distance to a star where one gets Earth's solar intensity (1372 W/m^2). For very dim stars, planets would have to be very close, and tidal effects are of concern.

This is important because it will help you to put your world in the Life Zone of your solar system.

Lifetime in Billions of Years:

This is how long your star will burn in a stable way. Remember, you need to allow time for your life forms to develop.

Important Math Note:

In numbers in the form of 1.23E-3, the E-3 stands for ten to the inverse third power, and is an instruction to divide by ten cubed (1000). (10 cubed means 10 x 10 x 10)

Thus E-3 means thousandths (1/1000)
E-6 means millionths (1/1,000,000) and
E-9 means (U.S.) billionths (1/1,000,000,000).

If you look at these tables you will see interesting changes as the stars get smaller. Pay special attention to the colored sections of the tables: you will be using these numbers in planning your own solar system.

Below: The E0 Class contains the the lowest mass Main Sequence stars.
Stars less massive than class E0 are called Brown Dwarfs.