Our weather can change, but every single day the Sun looks exactly the same.
Sure, clouds can block it out, but the Sun in the sky is always the same Sun. In astronomical terms, it’s a G-type main sequence star, with a roughly average surface temperature and level of brightness, compared to all the stars we can see.
But there are other stars out there that are many times dimmer, brighter, smaller, or bigger than the Sun. Recently, Slovakian graphic designer Martin Vargic imagined what it’d look like if one day, we awoke to see one of them in the sky.
This, for instance, is what it'd look like if we orbited Barnard's Star — an extremely small, dim star that's just six light years away from Earth — at the same distance that we orbit the Sun. (Of course, in reality, if we orbited this star instead of the Sun, things would be far too cold for liquid water and the evolution of life.)
This is Gliese 581: another red dwarf, about 31 percent as massive as the Sun.
This is Tau Ceti: a star that's a bit smaller than the Sun but similar in brightness, and may have several potentially habitable planets orbiting it.
Here's what it'd look like if the Earth were in a binary star system, like Kepler-35, in which two stars orbit around each other.
This is Alpha Centauri A: a Sun-like star that's just 4.37 light years away from us, the closest of any star.
This is Procyon, another relatively nearby star that's somewhat brighter than our Sun.
This is Sirius: a star that's about twice as massive as the Sun, but because of its closeness to Earth, appears as the brightest star in the sky.
This is Arcturus: a star that once looked like our Sun, but has exhausted most of the hydrogen fuel in its core. This caused its outer shell to expand, turning it into a so-called "orange giant."
And this is Aldebaran: an even bigger, brighter star that also exhausted its hydrogen, and is now fusing together helium atoms to make carbon. If we lived this close to Aldebaran, we’d certainly all be dead.
