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[a] Traditional astronomy tends to group stars into constellations or asterisms and give proper names to those, not to individual stars. Many star names are, in origin, descriptive of the part in the constellation they are found in; thus Phecda, a corruption of Arabic فخذ الدب (fakhdh ad-dubb, 'thigh of the bear').
A-type star In the Harvard spectral classification system, a class of main-sequence star having spectra dominated by Balmer absorption lines of hydrogen. Stars of spectral class A are typically blue-white or white in color, measure between 1.4 and 2.1 times the mass of the Sun, and have surface temperatures of 7,600–10,000 kelvin.
The Bright Star Catalogue, which is a star catalogue listing all stars of apparent magnitude 6.5 or brighter, or roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth, contains 9,096 stars. [1] The most voluminous modern catalogues list on the order of a billion stars, out of an estimated total of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way .
The adjectival forms of the names of astronomical bodies are not always easily predictable. Attested adjectival forms of the larger bodies are listed below, along with the two small Martian moons; in some cases they are accompanied by their demonymic equivalents, which denote hypothetical inhabitants of these bodies.
In astronomy, star names, in contrast to star designations, are proper names of stars that have emerged from usage in pre-modern astronomical traditions. Lists of these names appear in the following articles: List of Arabic star names; List of Chinese star names; List of proper names of stars: traditional proper names in modern usage around ...
A primary star, which is brighter and typically bigger than its companion stars, is designated by a capitalized A. Its companions are labelled B, C, and so on. For example, Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, is actually a double star, consisting of the naked-eye visible Sirius A and its dim white-dwarf companion Sirius B.
A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. [1] The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at ...
Main-sequence stars vary in surface temperature from approximately 2,000 to 50,000 K, whereas more-evolved stars – in particular, newly-formed white dwarfs – can have surface temperatures above 100,000 K. [3] Physically, the classes indicate the temperature of the star's atmosphere and are normally listed from hottest to coldest.