May 20, 2001
Your life began on a planet that never stops moving under a sky that never stops changing.
Sagittarius Star Cloud
Birthday · May 20, 2001
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APOD published May 20, 2001. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Stars come in all different colors. The color of a star indicates its surface temperature, an important property used to assign each star a spectral type. Most stars in the above Sagittarius Star Cloud are orange or red and relatively faint, as our Sun would appear. The blue and greenish stars are hotter, many being relatively young and massive. The bright red stars are cool Red Giants, bloated stars once similar to our Sun that have entered a more advanced stage of evolution. Stars of this Sagittarius Cloud lie towards the center of our Galaxy - tantalizing cosmic jewels viewed through a rift in the dark, pervasive, interstellar dust. This famous stellar grouping houses some of the oldest stars known.