About HIP 48655
HIP 48655 is a trash star. It sits in the constellation UMa and shines at apparent magnitude 12.8.
Its colour puts the surface at roughly 17830 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.
Trash star 12 EP
HIP 48655
RA 148.8312° · Dec 51.6164° · star
Score breakdown
· 3 badgesTrash 15 pts → Common
- Blue-white star +5
- Never sets (northern circumpolar) +4
- Star +3
Total score 12
3 more points to reach Common.
Badges
- Star · +3
- Never sets (northern circumpolar) · +4
- Blue-white star · +5
Trivia
Hard to believe
- True brightness. It pours out about 64.9 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 12.8 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Ursa Major.
- 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 February — 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 -0.3) — 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 17830 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
- -7.2
- bv
- -0.33
- constellation
- UMa
- luminosity
- 66069.3448
- mag
- 12.8
- name
- HIP 48655
How to see it
Look for HIP 48655 in the constellation UMa. At apparent magnitude 12.8, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.
Like any astronomical target, HIP 48655 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 48655 is a trash star
HIP 48655 scores 12 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the trash tier. Another 3 points would lift it into a rarer tier.
That score comes from 3 science badges — Star, Never sets (northern circumpolar) 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.