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Common star 20 EP

HR 438

RA 23.0316° · Dec 34.8000° · star

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Score breakdown

· 4 badges
20 pts · Common
Common 22 pts → Uncommon
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Giant star +6
  • Blue-white star +5
  • Star +3
Total score 20

2 more points to reach Uncommon.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Giant star · +6
  • Blue-white star · +5

Trivia

What it actually is

  • Spectral class. Its spectrum reads B7IIIMNp... — 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.
  • 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. Far away by human standards, yet still a local address inside the Milky Way's spiral arms.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 6.4 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Triangulum.
  • 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 October — that's when to go looking.

Could we get there?

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

Getting there

  • Aboard Voyager 1. ≈ 14.7 million years at Voyager 1's speed (17 km/s).

Properties

absmag
-0.649
bv
-0.103
constellation
Tri
dist ly
834.1586
luminosity
158.3434
mag
6.39
name
HR 438
spect
B7IIIMNp...

About HR 438

HR 438 is a common star. It lies about 834.2 light-years from Earth, sits in the constellation Tri, shines at apparent magnitude 6.39 and has spectral type B7IIIMNp....

Its spectrum reads B7IIIMNp... — 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 HR 438 in the constellation Tri. At apparent magnitude 6.39, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HR 438 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 HR 438 is a common star

HR 438 scores 20 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the common tier. Another 2 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 4 science badges — Star, Hot blue B-type star, Giant 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.