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Uncommon star 26 EP

Bet TrA

RA 238.7862° · Dec -63.4307° · star

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
26 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Naked-eye visible +8
  • Binary star +6
  • Giant star +6
  • Star +3
  • Yellow-white F-type star +3
Total score 26

8 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Naked-eye visible · +8
  • Binary star · +6
  • Yellow-white F-type star · +3
  • Giant star · +6

Trivia

What makes it special

  • Not one star but two. It is a binary: two stars orbiting a shared centre of mass. More than half of all the 'stars' you can see are actually multiple systems.

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads F2III — an F-type star — a little hotter, whiter and shorter-lived than the Sun.
  • Where it is in life. It is a giant. It has already exhausted its core hydrogen and swollen up enormously in response.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Inside our stellar backyard: every radio broadcast humanity has ever made has already swept past it.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 2.8 you can see it with your own eyes from a dark site, over in Triangulum Australe.
  • 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.

Could we get there?

  • Verdict. Hopelessly far for any craft humanity can build today.

Properties

absmag
2.367
binary
yes
bv
0.315
constellation
TrA
dist ly
40.3709
luminosity
9.8446
mag
2.83
name
Bet TrA
spect
F2III

About Bet TrA

Bet TrA is an uncommon star. It lies about 40.4 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation TrA, shines at apparent magnitude 2.83 and has spectral type F2III.

It is a binary: two stars orbiting a shared centre of mass. More than half of all the 'stars' you can see are actually multiple systems.

How to see it

Look for Bet TrA in the constellation TrA. At apparent magnitude 2.83, it can be glimpsed with the unaided eye under dark skies.

Like any astronomical target, Bet TrA 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 Bet TrA is an uncommon star

Bet TrA scores 26 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 8 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Star, Naked-eye visible, Binary star, Yellow-white F-type star and Giant 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.