What type of star is canis majoris

The second brightest star in Canis Major is Adhara with a magnitude of 1. It is also a binary star system that lies approximately light years away. Wezen is the third brightest star with a magnitude of 1. It is a yellow-white supergiant star that sits about 1, light years from our solar system. Canis Major contains one Messier object, M This is an open star cluster containing about stars. It is 26 light years in diameter and is located 2, light years from Earth. A few other notable deep-sky objects can also be found here.

These dim objects can only be seen with a large telescope. The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, also known as the Canis Major Overdensity, is an irregular galaxy that is thought to be the closest neighboring galaxy to our solar system.

NGC and IC are a pair of interacting spiral galaxies that are in the process of colliding with each other. They will eventually merge to form a larger galaxy. The constellation is depicted as a dog standing on its hind legs, pursuing a hare, represented by the constellation Lepus.

In mythology, Canis Major is associated with Laelaps, the fastest dog in the world, one destined to catch anything it pursued. Zeus gave Laelaps to Europa as a present, along with a javelin that could not miss. The gift proved to be an unfortunate one, as Europa herself met her end at the hands of her husband Cephalus, who was out hunting with the javelin.

Cephalus took the dog to Thebes in Boeotia a Greek province north of Athens to hunt down a fox that was causing some trouble there. Like Laelaps, the fox was very fast and was destined never to be caught. Once the dog found the fox and started chasing it, the race did not appear to have an end in sight. Zeus himself finally ended it and turned both animals to stone. He placed the dog in the night sky as the constellation Canis Major. Sirius, also known as the Dog Star , is the brightest star in the sky and the fifth nearest star system to the Sun.

Sirius is a binary star with an apparent magnitude of It is only 8. The brighter component, Sirius A, is a white main sequence star and the companion, Sirius B, is a white dwarf that orbits the primary every 50 years.

The distance between the two stars varies between 8. The companion is not visible to the unaided eye. Sirius A has twice the mass of the Sun and is 25 more luminous. Sirius B is almost equal to the Sun in mass 0. Barstow University of Leicester. Sirius A has an absolute visual magnitude of 1. The age of the star system is estimated to be between and million years.

Greeks and Romans believed the star was somehow responsible for the summer heat. The large, bluish-white star Sirius A dominates the scene, while Sirius B is the small but very hot and blue white-dwarf star on the right.

The two stars revolve around each other every 50 years. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. The Sirius system, only 8. Sirius B is faint because of its tiny size. Its diameter is only 7, miles about 12 thousand kilometres , slightly smaller than the size of our Earth. The Sirius system is so close to Earth that most of the familiar constellations would have nearly the same appearance as in our own sky.

In this rendition, we see in the background the three bright stars that make up the Summer Triangle: Altair, Deneb, and Vega. But there is one unfamiliar addition to the constellations: our own Sun is the second-magnitude star, shown as a small dot just below and to the right of Sirius A.

Credit: G. Bacon STScI. If this hypergiant would be placed in the center of the solar system , its surface would extend beyond the orbit of Jupiter , and some estimate it would extend up to the orbit of Saturn. It is an extreme oxygen-rich and pulsating variable star. It has an apparent magnitude that varies from 6.

This hypergiant is losing its mass to a rate of around 30 times the mass of Earth every single year. Much of this material has taken the shape of a cloud of dust and gas around the star. It is speculated that the hypergiant has already lost more than half of its mass. The hypergiant is around VY Canis Majoris is cooler than our sun, with an estimated surface temperature of around 3. Our Sun has around 5. VY Canis Majoris has an average density of 5.

It is bright enough to be observed with a pair of regular binoculars. Consecuentely, VY Canis Majoris is the biggest star of the constellation. The Canis Major constellation represents the big hunter dog of Orion, the celestial hunter. It is the home of the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius.

VY Canis Majoris is big enough to explode as a hypernova or superluminous nova. Hypernovas produce considerably higher amounts of energy than regular supernovas.