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Rare star 37 EP

HD 76536

RA 133.7465° · Dec -47.5924° · star

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Score breakdown

· 2 badges
37 pts · Rare
Rare 50 pts → Epic
  • Wolf-Rayet star (shedding itself) +34
  • Star +3
Total score 37

13 more points to reach Epic.

Badges

  • Star · +3
  • Wolf-Rayet star (shedding itself) · +34

Trivia

Hard to believe

  • True brightness. It pours out about 2.6 million 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 WC... — a Wolf-Rayet star: a stellar monster shedding its own outer layers in a ferocious wind, on its way to a supernova.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 8.8 it is just past naked-eye reach — ordinary binoculars will pull it in, over in Vela.
  • 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 February — that's when to go looking.

Its true colour

  • Its true colour. Measured through blue and visual filters it comes out yellow-white (B−V 0.3) — a shade brighter and crisper than our own Sun.
  • 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 7250 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

Properties

absmag
-11.19
bv
0.334
constellation
Vel
luminosity
2606153.55
mag
8.81
name
HD 76536
spect
WC...

About HD 76536

HD 76536 is a rare star. It sits in the constellation Vel, shines at apparent magnitude 8.81 and has spectral type WC....

Its spectrum reads WC... — a Wolf-Rayet star: a stellar monster shedding its own outer layers in a ferocious wind, on its way to a supernova.

How to see it

Look for HD 76536 in the constellation Vel. At apparent magnitude 8.81, it is an easy target for binoculars.

Like any astronomical target, HD 76536 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 76536 is a rare star

HD 76536 scores 37 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the rare tier. Another 13 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 2 science badges — Star and Wolf-Rayet star (shedding itself) — 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.