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Trash star 14 EP

HD 51286

RA 103.9311° · Dec -25.1923° · star

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Score breakdown

· 3 badges
14 pts · Trash
Trash 15 pts → Common
  • Hot blue B-type star +6
  • Subgiant (leaving the main sequence) +5
  • Star +3
Total score 14

1 more point to reach Common.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Hot blue B-type star · +6
  • Subgiant (leaving the main sequence) · +5

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 855.1 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 B8/B9IV — 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.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 10 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Canis Major.
  • Southern sky. It rides the southern half of the sky — an easier target the further south you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around January — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out brilliant white (B−V 0) — hotter and whiter than the Sun, the colour of Sirius or Vega.
  • 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 9690 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

Properties

absmag
-10
bv
0.037
constellation
CMa
luminosity
870963.59
mag
10
name
HD 51286
spect
B8/B9IV

Nearby objects

About HD 51286

HD 51286 is a trash star. It sits in the constellation CMa, shines at apparent magnitude 10 and has spectral type B8/B9IV.

Its spectrum reads B8/B9IV — 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 HD 51286 in the constellation CMa. At apparent magnitude 10, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, HD 51286 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 HD 51286 is a trash star

HD 51286 scores 14 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the trash tier. Another 1 point would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 3 science badges — Star, Hot blue B-type star and Subgiant (leaving the main sequence) — 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.