Bayer designation
A Bayer designation is a stellar designation in which a specific star is identified by a Greek or Latin letter followed by the genitive form of its parent constellation's Latin name. The original list of Bayer designations contained 1,564 stars. ...
for a
star
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...
located in the southern
constellation
A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms Asterism (astronomy), a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object.
The origins of the e ...
of
Circinus
Circinus is a small, faint constellation in the southern sky, first defined in 1756 by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille. Its name is Latin for compass (drawing tool), compass, referring to the Technical drawing, drafting tool used ...
. With an apparent visual magnitude of 6.08, it is barely visible to the naked eye on a dark night. (According to the
Bortle scale
The Bortle scale (also known as the Bottle scale) is a nine-level numeric scale that measures the night sky's brightness of a particular location. It quantifies the astronomical observability of celestial objects and the interference caused by lig ...
, it requires the lighting level of suburban skies or darker to be seen.) The distance to this star, as estimated using an annual parallax shift of 2.56
mas
Mas, Más or MAS may refer to:
Film and TV
* Más y Menos, fictional superhero characters, from the Teen Titans animated television series
* Más (Breaking Bad), "Más" (''Breaking Bad''), a season three episode of ''Breaking Bad''
Songs
* Más ( ...
, is around 1,300
light year
A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...
stellar classification
In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their stellar spectrum, spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a Prism (optics), prism or diffraction grati ...
of B2/3 Vn,
where the 'n' suffix indicates broad ("nebulous")
absorption line
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 iden ...
s due to rotation. It is a
slowly pulsating B star A slowly pulsating B-type star (SPB), formerly known as a 53 Persei variable, is a type of pulsating variable star. They may also be termed a long-period pulsating B star (LPB). As the name implies, they are main-sequence stars of spectral type B2 ...
with a frequency of 0.26877 d−1 and an amplitude of 0.0046 magnitude. The averaged quadratic field strength of the star's longitudinal
magnetic field
A magnetic field is a vector field that describes the magnetic influence on moving electric charges, electric currents, and magnetic materials. A moving charge in a magnetic field experiences a force perpendicular to its own velocity and to ...
is .
The star is around 32 million years old and is spinning rapidly with a
projected rotational velocity
Stellar rotation is the angular motion of a star about its axis. The rate of rotation can be measured from the spectrum of the star, or by timing the movements of active features on the surface.
The rotation of a star produces an equatorial bulge ...
of 264 km/s. It has an estimated 5.5 times the
mass of the Sun
The solar mass () is a standard unit of mass in astronomy, equal to approximately . It is often used to indicate the masses of other stars, as well as stellar clusters, nebulae, galaxies and black holes. It is approximately equal to the mass ...
effective temperature
The effective temperature of a body such as a star or planet is the temperature of a black body that would emit the same total amount of electromagnetic radiation. Effective temperature is often used as an estimate of a body's surface temperature ...