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- Main-sequence stars
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Encyclopedic overview
Main-sequence stars, also called dwarf stars, are stars that fuse hydrogen in their cores. These are dwarfs in that they are smaller than giant stars, but are not necessarily less luminous. For example, a blue O-type dwarf star is brighter than most red giants. Main-sequence stars belong to luminosity class V.
There are also other objects called dwarfs known as white dwarfs. These are not main-sequence stars but stellar remnants. Unlike true stars, brown dwarfs have too little mass to sustain nuclear fusion, so they do not belong to this category either. The border between the lowest-mass main-sequence stars and brown dwarfs is somewhat ambiguous.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Category:Main-sequence stars” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.