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Uncommon variable star 23 EP

HIP 6115

RA 19.6276° · Dec -67.9180° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
23 pts · Uncommon
Uncommon 34 pts → Rare
  • Strongly variable +10
  • Variable star +5
  • White A-type star +5
  • A named variable star +3
Total score 23

11 more points to reach Rare.

Badges

  • Variable star · +5
  • White A-type star · +5
  • Strongly variable · +10
  • A named variable star · +3

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 190.5 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 A9.5: — an A-type star: white-hot, typically about twice the Sun's mass, and the class most of the sky's famous bright stars belong to.
  • 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 11.6 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.

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
-8.37
constellation
Tuc
luminosity
194088.5878
mag
11.63
name
HIP 6115
spect
A9.5:
var amplitude
0.55
var designation
AM
var max
11.412
var min
11.962

About HIP 6115

HIP 6115 is an uncommon variable star. It sits in the constellation Tuc, shines at apparent magnitude 11.63 and has spectral type A9.5:.

Its spectrum reads A9.5: — an A-type star: white-hot, typically about twice the Sun's mass, and the class most of the sky's famous bright stars belong to.

How to see it

Look for HIP 6115 in the constellation Tuc. At apparent magnitude 11.63, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, HIP 6115 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 6115 is an uncommon variable star

HIP 6115 scores 23 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the uncommon tier. Another 11 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Variable star, White A-type star, Strongly 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.