About 3C 273
3C 273 is a trash star. It sits in the constellation Vir and shines at apparent magnitude 12.88.
Its colour puts the surface at roughly 8840 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.
Trash star 14 EP
3C 273
RA 187.2779° · Dec 2.0524° · star
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Score breakdown
· 3 badgesTrash 15 pts → Common
- Has a proper name +8
- Star +3
- On the zodiac +3
Total score 14
1 more point to reach Common.
Badges
- Star · +3
- Has a proper name · +8
- On the zodiac · +3
Trivia
Hard to believe
- True brightness. It pours out about 60.3 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 12.9 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures, over in Virgo.
- Seen from everywhere. It sits almost on the celestial equator, so it can be seen from essentially anywhere on Earth.
- Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around March — 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 0.1) — 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 8840 K, against the Sun's 5778 K.
What's in a name
- Named. Notable enough to have earned a proper name, not just a catalogue number.
Properties
- absmag
- -7.12
- bv
- 0.12
- constellation
- Vir
- luminosity
- 61376.2005
- mag
- 12.88
- name
- 3C 273
- named
- yes
How to see it
Look for 3C 273 in the constellation Vir. At apparent magnitude 12.88, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.
Like any astronomical target, 3C 273 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 3C 273 is a trash star
3C 273 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, Has a proper name and On the zodiac — 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.