Red Dwarf

stars · space · tiny-giants

The smallest stars. Red dwarfs are the least massive and smallest kind of star that can fuse hydrogen into energy. Even though they're the tiniest stars, they still burn for an incredibly long time, longer than any other type of star.

Dimmer than you'd think. Red dwarfs are so dim that even though they're everywhere, you can't see a single one with your naked eye. They glow with a reddish color because they're much cooler than bigger, brighter stars like our Sun.

Most stars are red dwarfs. About three-quarters of all the stars that are fusing hydrogen in our Milky Way galaxy are red dwarfs. In our cosmic neighborhood, 50 out of the 60 nearest stars are red dwarfs, including Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun.

Hidden in plain sight. Even though red dwarfs are super common, they're hard to spot because they're so faint. You'd need a telescope to see most of them, but they're actually all around us in space.