Melbourne Stars

The Melbourne Stars is an Australian Twenty20 cricket team based in Melbourne, Victoria that competes in Australia's Twenty20 competition, the Big Bash League. The Stars wear a green cricket uniform and play their home matches at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

They have made the finals in every year of the Big Bash.

They are coached by former New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming. Their captain is David Hussey.

Mascot

Starman is the official mascot of the Melbourne Stars.

In BBL|05 the Stars introduced a secondary mascot Sammy the Seagull after a seagull was struck with a cricket ball hit by Adam Voges during a Melbourne Stars and Perth Scorchers match in BBL|04 while the Stars were fielding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQjQLUEAsew

2015/16 squad

Honours

Domestic

Melbourne

Melbourne (/ˈmɛlbərn/, AU ⁱ/ˈmɛlbən/) is the capital and most populous city in the Australian state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia and Oceania. The name "Melbourne" refers to the area of urban agglomeration (as well as a census statistical division) spanning 9,900 km² (3,800 sq mi) which comprises the broader metropolitan area, as well as being the common name for its city centre. The metropolis is located on the large natural bay of Port Phillip and expands into the hinterlands towards the Dandenong and Macedon mountain ranges, Mornington Peninsula and Yarra Valley. Melbourne consists of 31 municipalities. It has a population of 4,347,955 as of 2013, and its inhabitants are called Melburnians.

Founded by free settlers from the British Crown colony of Van Diemen's Land on 30 August 1835, in what was then the colony of New South Wales, it was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837. It was named "Melbourne" by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, in honour of the British Prime Minister of the day, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. It was officially declared a city by Queen Victoria in 1847, after which it became the capital of the newly founded colony of Victoria in 1851. During the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, it was transformed into one of the world's largest and wealthiest cities. After the federation of Australia in 1901, it served as the nation's interim seat of government until 1927.

Big Bash League

The Big Bash League (BBL, also known as the KFC Big Bash League for sponsorship reasons) is an Australian domestic Twenty20 cricket tournament, which was established in 2011 by Cricket Australia. The Big Bash League replaced the previous competition, the KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, and features eight city-based franchises instead of the six state teams which had participated previously. The competition has been sponsored by fast food chicken outlet KFC since its inception.

BBL matches are played in Australia during the summer in the months of December and January. It is now placed eighth in the list of most attended sports leagues in the world with respect to average crowd per match (2015–16 season).

Out of the eight teams in the tournament, four have won the title at least once. The Perth Scorchers are the most successful team in the league's short history, winning the title consecutively for two years and have reached the final of the tournament in four of the five seasons. The other three teams which have won the title are Sydney Sixers, Brisbane Heat and Sydney Thunder.

Twenty20

Twenty20 cricket, sometimes written Twenty-20, and often abbreviated to T20, is a short form of cricket. At the professional level, it was originally introduced by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in 2003 for the inter-county competition in England and Wales. In a Twenty20 game the two teams have a single innings each, which is restricted to a maximum of 20 overs. Together with first-class and List A cricket, Twenty20 is one of the three current forms of cricket recognised by the International Cricket Council (ICC) as being at the highest international or domestic level.

A typical Twenty20 game is completed in about three hours, with each innings lasting around 75–90 minutes and a 10–20-minute interval. This is much shorter than previously-existing forms of the game, and is closer to the timespan of other popular team sports. It was introduced to create a fast-paced form of the game which would be attractive to spectators at the ground and viewers on television.

Since its inception the game has been very successful resulting in its spread around the cricket world. On most international tours there is at least one Twenty20 match and all Test-playing nations have a domestic cup competition. The inaugural ICC World Twenty20 was played in South Africa in 2007 with India winning by five runs against Pakistan in the final. Pakistan won the second tournament in 2009, and England won the title in 2010 and West Indies won in 2012. Sri Lanka are the reigning champions after winning the 2014 competition beating India by 6 wickets.

Star

A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, and the brightest stars gained proper names. Extensive catalogues of stars have been assembled by astronomers, which provide standardized star designations.

For at least a portion of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Once the hydrogen in the core of a star is nearly exhausted, almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime and, for some stars, by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities, known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram), allows the age and evolutionary state of a star to be determined.