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Common star 16 EP

HD 140911

RA 237.9462° · Dec -72.1190° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
16 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Blue-white star +5
  • Star +3
  • Main-sequence star +2
Total score 16

6 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Main-sequence star · +2
  • Blue-white star · +5

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 2.3 million times as much light as the Sun. It only looks ordinary because it is so far away.

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads B8/B9V — a blue-white B-type star, with a surface tens of thousands of degrees hot and a life measured in tens of millions of years.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 8.9 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Apus.
  • Southern sky only. So far south it never rises for most of the northern hemisphere. To see it you'd have to travel to Chile, South Africa or Australia.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around May — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out blue-white (B−V -0) — the hallmark of a surface far hotter than the Sun's.
  • Why no green stars. No star ever looks green: a surface hot enough to peak in green also floods out plenty of red and blue, and your eye blends the mixture back to white.

By the numbers

  • Surface temperature. Its colour puts the surface at roughly 10480 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

Properties

absmag
-11.06
bv
-0.027
constellation
Aps
luminosity
2312064.7902
mag
8.94
name
HD 140911
spect
B8/B9V

About HD 140911

HD 140911 is a common star. It sits in the constellation Aps, shines at apparent magnitude 8.94 and has spectral type B8/B9V.

Its spectrum reads B8/B9V — a blue-white B-type star, with a surface tens of thousands of degrees hot and a life measured in tens of millions of years.

How to see it

Look for HD 140911 in the constellation Aps. At apparent magnitude 8.94, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 140911 is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why HD 140911 is a common star

HD 140911 scores 16 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 6 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Hot blue B-type star, Main-sequence star and Blue-white star — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.