About HIP 5642
HIP 5642 is a trash star. It sits in the constellation Tuc and shines at apparent magnitude 11.22.
Its colour puts the surface at roughly 10900 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.
Trash star 8 EP
HIP 5642
RA 18.1207° · Dec -60.8901° · star
Score breakdown
· 2 badgesTrash 15 pts → Common
- Blue-white star +5
- Star +3
Total score 8
7 more points to reach Common.
Badges
- Star · +3
- Blue-white star · +5
Trivia
Hard to believe
- True brightness. It pours out about 278 thousand times as much light as the Sun. It only looks ordinary because it is so far away.
Find it in the sky
- How to spot it. At magnitude 11.2 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Tucana.
- 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 October — 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 -0.1) — 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 10900 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.
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.
Properties
- absmag
- -8.78
- bv
- -0.057
- constellation
- Tuc
- luminosity
- 283139.1996
- mag
- 11.22
- name
- HIP 5642
How to see it
Look for HIP 5642 in the constellation Tuc. At apparent magnitude 11.22, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.
Like any astronomical target, HIP 5642 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 5642 is a trash star
HIP 5642 scores 8 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the trash tier. Another 7 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 2 science badges — 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.