Consider other things that look alike. When Sir William Herschel, in the 1800s, first saw dots of light that moved slowly across the sky, he knew they could not be stars, but they looked like stars through his telescope, so he called them “star-like,” which in Latin becomes “aster-oid” or just asteroids. Their similar appearance through a telescope eyepiece was irrelevant to what they actually are. Stars are billions of times larger than asteroids and operate under different forces of nature.
