Often, we call the stages of a star its “life cycle”, and I’ve been thinking about this for a bit.
Stars meet many of the requirements for living organisms: they can consume matter, they can react to stimuli (sort of, does gravity count? e.g. binary systems), they can reproduce (they expel gas clouds on death that can eventually create new stars), they can grow and change size over their lifespan, and they maintain equilibrium (between gravity and radiation pressure from fusion)
What stops stars from being considered living objects?
edit: as it turns out, the formation of new stars after death doesn’t really count as reproduction, and gravity shouldn’t count as stimuli (a rock experiences gravity too, but it doesn’t react to stimuli)
I believe them to be another type of “locally anti-entropic self-regulating systems” (for lack of a better term) which are parallel to life but not alive perse, just other type of emergent behavior. Stars do not have a metabolism nor a way of reprodution without destruction of the system.