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Common variable star 18 EP

HIP 112887

RA 342.9121° · Dec 51.8451° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
18 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Variable star +5
  • Gently variable +4
  • A named variable star +3
Total score 18

4 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Variable star · +5
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Gently variable · +4
  • A named variable star · +3

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 106.7 thousand 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 B — 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.
  • It changes. This star does not hold still: its brightness rises and falls on a rhythm of hours, days or years, either pulsing in size or being eclipsed by a companion.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 12.3 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Lacerta.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around September — that's when to go looking.

What's in a name

  • Its catalogue. The HIP number comes from Hipparcos, the ESA satellite that between 1989 and 1993 pinned down 118,000 stars precisely enough to triangulate their distances.

How we came to know it

  • Cosmic yardstick. Variable stars are how we measured the universe. In 1912 Henrietta Leavitt showed that a pulsating star's rhythm reveals its true brightness — turning these stars into distance markers.

Properties

absmag
-7.74
constellation
Lac
luminosity
108642.5624
mag
12.26
name
HIP 112887
spect
B
var amplitude
0.36
var designation
V442
var max
12.067
var min
12.427

About HIP 112887

HIP 112887 is a common variable star. It sits in the constellation Lac, shines at apparent magnitude 12.26 and has spectral type B.

Its spectrum reads B — 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 HIP 112887 in the constellation Lac. At apparent magnitude 12.26, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 112887 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 HIP 112887 is a common variable star

HIP 112887 scores 18 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 4 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Variable star, Hot blue B-type star, Gently variable and A named variable 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.