Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work; to remix – to adapt the work; Under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
The distance between the two stars is at least 3,750 AU (0.06 light-year, or almost a hundred times the average distance between Pluto and the Sun), so their orbital period is 170,000 years or more. [16] Both stars share similar physical characteristics to the Sun, [14] so they are considered solar analogs.
The two stars are of nearly equal brightness, with visual magnitudes of 12.7 and 13.2 as seen from Earth. They orbit one another every 26.5 years. The distance between the two stars varies from 2.1 to 8.8 astronomical units (310 to 1,320 Gm ).
Stellar parallax is the apparent shift of position of any nearby star (or other object) against the background of distant stars. By extension, it is a method for determining the distance to the star through trigonometry, the stellar parallax method.
An eclipsing binary star is a binary star system in which the orbital plane of the two stars lies so nearly in the line of sight of the observer that the components undergo mutual eclipses. [20] In the case where the binary is also a spectroscopic binary and the parallax of the system is known, the binary is quite valuable for stellar analysis.
The moving-cluster method relies on observing the proper motions and Doppler shift of each member of a group of stars known to form a cluster. The idea is that since all the stars share a common space velocity, they will appear to move towards a point of common convergence ("vanishing point") on the sky.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
The uncertainty is due to no-one knowing exactly how far away the stars are. If they are exactly the same distance from us then the distance between them is only 17 800 AU (0.281 ly). [7] Between Mizar and Alcor, the 8th-magnitude star Sidus Ludoviciana is a distant background object.