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FS Canis Majoris Variable
An FS Canis Majoris variable (FS CMa star) is a type of eruptive variable star. The class of variable stars are named after its prototype, FS Canis Majoris. They are somewhat poorly understood, but are probably binary star systems in which mass exchange is ongoing or has recently happened. These most likely consist of at least one B-type main-sequence star in a dust envelope. They undergo irregular light variations over long periods of time, with magnitude variation of approximately 2 magnitudes. The hydrogen emission lines from FS CMa stars are much stronger than in normal Be stars, and certain forbidden lines are present in the spectrum as well so they are classified as a sub-type of B star. FS CMa stars are rare and it has been difficult to determine their properties well enough to determine what causes their unusual character. Several have been detected in massive star clusters and this has ruled out some theories about their origin. The preferred explanation is still for a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eruptive Variable
A variable star is a star whose brightness as seen from Earth (its apparent magnitude) changes with time. This variation may be caused by a change in emitted light or by something partly blocking the light, so variable stars are classified as either: * Intrinsic variables, whose luminosity actually changes; for example, because the star periodically swells and shrinks. * Extrinsic variables, whose apparent changes in brightness are due to changes in the amount of their light that can reach Earth; for example, because the star has an orbiting companion that sometimes eclipses it. Many, possibly most, stars have at least some variation in luminosity: the energy output of the Sun, for example, varies by about 0.1% over an 11-year solar cycle. Discovery An ancient Egyptian calendar of lucky and unlucky days composed some 3,200 years ago may be the oldest preserved historical document of the discovery of a variable star, the eclipsing binary Algol. Of the modern astronomers, the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FS Canis Majoris
FS Canis Majoris (FS CMa), also known as HD 45677 or MWC 142, is a B-type star in the constellation of Canis Major. It has an apparent visual magnitude of approximately 8.50, having varied between magnitudes 7.35 and 8.58. Feinstein and colleagues reported in 1976 that it had decreased by 0.9 magnitude between 1969 and 1976, whereas it had only varied by 0.3 magnitude in the 70 years beforehand. Sometimes it could vary by up to 0.5 magnitude in a year or 0.1 magnitude in a night, and there did not appear to be any regular period to its variability. Astronomer Anatoly Miroshnichenko has made it the prototype of a new type of variable star, the FS Canis Majoris variables. These are hot blue-white stars that exhibit forbidden line emission and strong infra-red excess suggestive of very young ( pre-main-sequence) stars yet they do not lie in star-forming regions. Nor did they appear to be stars that had evolved off the main sequence into giant or supergi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary Star
A binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved using a telescope as separate stars, in which case they are called ''visual binaries''. Many visual binaries have long orbital periods of several centuries or millennia and therefore have orbits which are uncertain or poorly known. They may also be detected by indirect techniques, such as spectroscopy (''spectroscopic binaries'') or astrometry (''astrometric binaries''). If a binary star happens to orbit in a plane along our line of sight, its components will eclipse and transit each other; these pairs are called ''eclipsing binaries'', or, together with other binaries that change brightness as they orbit, ''photometric binaries''. If components in binary star systems are close enough they can gravitationally distort their mutual outer stellar atmospheres. In some cases, thes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
B-type Main-sequence Star
A B-type main-sequence star (B V) is a main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) star of spectral type B and luminosity class V. These stars have from 2 to 16 times the mass of the Sun and surface temperatures between 10,000 and 30,000 K. B-type stars are extremely luminous and blue. Their spectra have neutral helium, which are most prominent at the B2 subclass, and moderate hydrogen lines. Examples include Regulus and Algol A. This class of stars was introduced with the Harvard sequence of stellar spectra and published in the ''Revised Harvard photometry'' catalogue. The definition of type B-type stars was the presence of non-ionized helium lines with the absence of singly ionized helium in the blue-violet portion of the spectrum. All of the spectral classes, including the B type, were subdivided with a numerical suffix that indicated the degree to which they approached the next classification. Thus B2 is 1/5 of the way from type B (or B0) to type A. Later, however, more refined s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnitude (astronomy)
In astronomy, magnitude is a unitless measure of the brightness Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating or reflecting light. In other words, brightness is the perception elicited by the luminance of a visual target. The perception is not linear to luminance, ... of an astronomical object, object in a defined passband, often in the visible spectrum, visible or infrared spectrum, but sometimes across all wavelengths. An imprecise but systematic determination of the magnitude of objects was introduced in ancient times by Hipparchus. The scale is Logarithmic scale, logarithmic and defined such that a magnitude 1 star is exactly 100 times brighter than a magnitude 6 star. Thus each step of one magnitude is \sqrt[5] \approx 2.512 times brighter than the magnitude 1 higher. The brighter an object appears, the lower the value of its magnitude, with the brightest objects reaching negative values. Astronomers use two different defini ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the chemical element with the symbol H and atomic number 1. Hydrogen is the lightest element. At standard conditions hydrogen is a gas of diatomic molecules having the formula . It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, and highly combustible. Hydrogen is the most abundant chemical substance in the universe, constituting roughly 75% of all normal matter.However, most of the universe's mass is not in the form of baryons or chemical elements. See dark matter and dark energy. Stars such as the Sun are mainly composed of hydrogen in the plasma state. Most of the hydrogen on Earth exists in molecular forms such as water and organic compounds. For the most common isotope of hydrogen (symbol 1H) each atom has one proton, one electron, and no neutrons. In the early universe, the formation of protons, the nuclei of hydrogen, occurred during the first second after the Big Bang. The emergence of neutral hydrogen atoms throughout the universe occurred about 370,000 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emission Lines
A spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum, resulting from emission or absorption of light in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby frequencies. Spectral lines are often used to identify atoms and molecules. These "fingerprints" can be compared to the previously collected ones of atoms and molecules, and are thus used to identify the atomic and molecular components of stars and planets, which would otherwise be impossible. Types of line spectra Spectral lines are the result of interaction between a quantum system (usually atoms, but sometimes molecules or atomic nuclei) and a single photon. When a photon has about the right amount of energy (which is connected to its frequency) to allow a change in the energy state of the system (in the case of an atom this is usually an electron changing orbitals), the photon is absorbed. Then the energy will be spontaneously re-emitted, either as one photon at the same frequenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Be Star
Be stars are a heterogeneous set of stars with B spectral types and emission lines. A narrower definition, sometimes referred to as ''classical Be stars'', is a non-supergiant B star whose spectrum has, or had at some time, one or more Balmer emission lines. Definition and classification Many stars have B-type spectra and show hydrogen emission lines, including many supergiants, Herbig Ae/Be stars, mass-transferring binary systems, and B stars. It is preferred to restrict usage of the term Be star to non-supergiant stars showing one or more Balmer series lines in emission. These are sometimes referred to as classical Be stars. The emission lines may be present only at certain times. Although the Be type spectrum is most strongly produced in class B stars, it is also detected in O and A shell stars, and these are sometimes included under the "Be star" banner. Be stars are primarily considered to be main sequence stars, but a number of subgiants and giant stars are also inc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Forbidden Line
In spectroscopy, a forbidden mechanism (forbidden transition or forbidden line) is a spectral line associated with absorption or emission of photons by atomic nuclei, atoms, or molecules which undergo a transition that is not allowed by a particular selection rule but is allowed if the approximation associated with that rule is not made. For example, in a situation where, according to usual approximations (such as the electric dipole approximation for the interaction with light), the process cannot happen, but at a higher level of approximation (e.g. magnetic dipole, or electric quadrupole) the process is allowed but at a low rate. An example is phosphorescent glow-in-the-dark materials, which absorb light and form an excited state whose decay involves a spin flip, and is therefore forbidden by electric dipole transitions. The result is emission of light slowly over minutes or hours. Should an atomic nucleus, atom or molecule be raised to an excited state and should the transit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
B(e) Star
A B[e] star, frequently called a B[e]-type star, is a Stellar classification, B-type star with distinctive forbidden mechanism, forbidden neutral or low ionisation emission lines in its spectrum. The designation results from combining the spectral class ''B'', the lowercase ''e'' denoting emission in the spectral classification system, and the surrounding square brackets signifying forbidden lines. These stars frequently also show strong hydrogen emission lines, but this feature is present in a variety of other stars and is not sufficient to classify a B[e] object. Other observational characteristics include optical linear polarization and often infrared radiation that is much stronger than in ordinary B-class stars, called infrared excess. As the B[e] nature is transient, B[e]-type stars might exhibit a normal B-type spectrum at times, and hitherto normal B-type stars may become B[e]-type stars. Discovery Many Be stars were discovered to have spectral peculiarities. One of these ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Star Cluster
Star clusters are large groups of stars. Two main types of star clusters can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of ten thousand to millions of old stars which are gravitationally bound, while open clusters are more loosely clustered groups of stars, generally containing fewer than a few hundred members, and are often very young. Open clusters become disrupted over time by the gravitational influence of giant molecular clouds as they move through the galaxy, but cluster members will continue to move in broadly the same direction through space even though they are no longer gravitationally bound; they are then known as a stellar association, sometimes also referred to as a ''moving group''. Star clusters visible to the naked eye include the Pleiades, Hyades, and 47 Tucanae. Open cluster Open clusters are very different from globular clusters. Unlike the spherically distributed globulars, they are confined to the galactic plane, and are almost always found wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stellar Merger
A stellar collision is the coming together of two stars caused by stellar dynamics within a star cluster, or by the orbital decay of a binary star due to stellar mass loss or gravitational radiation, or by other mechanisms not yet well understood. Astronomers predict that events of this type occur in the globular clusters of our galaxy about once every 10,000 years. On 2 September 2008 scientists first observed a stellar merger in Scorpius (named V1309 Scorpii), though it was not known to be the result of a stellar merger at the time. Any stars in the universe can collide, whether they are "alive", meaning fusion is still active in the star, or "dead", with fusion no longer taking place. White dwarf stars, neutron stars, black holes, main sequence stars, giant stars, and supergiants are very different in type, mass, temperature, and radius, and so react differently. A gravitational wave event that occurred on 25 August 2017, GW170817, was reported on 16 October 2017 to be asso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
