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Spectroscopy and how we know what stars are made of

Brian Cox explains how we can discover what stars are made from by analysing the light that arrives on earth from the stars. Elements are shown to emit certain colours when they are burnt. Star light can be analysed using spectroscopy which generates a bar code style pattern, unique for each element. This shows up as black lines on the rainbow spectrum from white light. It can be used to show all stars only contain the same 92 elements as we find here on earth.

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