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The median of the likely orbits is 12.4 days. Its orbit would likely have an eccentricity of 0.24 or less. [118] It could have lakes of molten lava and would be far too close to Alpha Centauri B to harbour life. [119] If confirmed, this planet might be called Alpha Centauri Bc. However, the name has not been used in the literature, as it is not ...
A subsequent time series analysis of chromospheric indicators in 2002 suggests a longer rotation period of 116.6 ± 0.7 days. [29] Later observations of the star's magnetic field subsequently revealed that the star rotates with a period of 89.8 ± 4 days, consistent with a measurement of 92.1 +4.2 −3.5 days from radial velocity observations ...
This illustrates the fact that there are far more faint stars than bright stars: in the entire sky, there are about 500 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 4 but 15.5 million stars brighter than apparent magnitude 14. [108] The apex of the Sun's way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way.
More than 100 OB and Wolf–Rayet stars have been identified there so far. [47] They seem to have all been formed in a single star formation event a few million years ago. The existence of these relatively young stars was a surprise to experts, who expected the tidal forces from the central black hole to prevent their formation. [48]
Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, [3] range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, [4] to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's centre of mass. Most of the mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter, with only a few per cent of that mass ...
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.
This article documents the most distant astronomical objects discovered and verified so far, and the time periods in which they were so classified. For comparisons with the light travel distance of the astronomical objects listed below, the age of the universe since the Big Bang is currently estimated as 13.787±0.020 Gyr.
The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles . In actual usage, the terms galactic plane and galactic poles usually refer specifically to the plane and poles of the Milky Way , in which Planet Earth is located.