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Rare star 37 EP

HD 88500

RA 152.6330° · Dec -60.6451° · 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 524.8 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 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 10.5 you'll want a small backyard telescope, over in Carina.
  • 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 February — 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 9850 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.

Properties

absmag
-9.47
bv
0.023
constellation
Car
luminosity
534564.3594
mag
10.53
name
HD 88500
spect
WC...

About HD 88500

HD 88500 is a rare star. It sits in the constellation Car, shines at apparent magnitude 10.53 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 88500 in the constellation Car. At apparent magnitude 10.53, a small backyard telescope will bring it into view.

Like any astronomical target, HD 88500 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 88500 is a rare star

HD 88500 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.