Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Alpha Beta ,Centauri
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Alpha Beta ,Centauri
Hadar, also known as Beta Centauri, is the 10th brightest stars (11th as viewed from Earth). Hadar is a blue-white super giant in the constellation Centaurus (Cen). In about 4,000 years, the motion of Alpha Centauri, who’s proper name is Rigel Kentaurus, will carry it close enough to Hadar that they will appear to be a magnificent double star. Because of the distance away from Earth that Alpha and Beta Centauri are (approximately 90 parsecs), they will be an optical double. As they sit today, the two stars look like a pair of eyes, the right one being Hadar and the left being Rigel Kentaurus. These two stars are considered pointer stars. A “pointer star” is a star that points towards the Southern Cross. Some of the Australian aboriginals call this pair “The two men that once were lions”. Other aboriginals consider them to be the twins that created the world.” Hadar is a proper name of unknown meaning, and has been paired with the name "Wezen," the two applied to the two bright stars in Centaurus as well as to stars in Columba, "Wezen” now commonly used for Delta Canis Majoris. Hadar, less often known as Agena (from the "knee" of the Centaur), is quite the magnificent star.
At a distance of 525 light years, blue class B (B1) Hadar is 130 times farther away than Rigel Kentaurus, and is bright because it is truly and very generously luminous, shining (accounting for the ultraviolet radiated from the 25,500-Kelvin surface) 112,000 times more brightly than the Sun. Hadar, however, is not one star, but two. Sophisticated observations that rely on the interference properties of light show that the single point of light actually consists of a pair of nearly identical stars each some 55,000 times more luminous than the Sun separated (from our perspective) by only 2.5 astronomical units. The temperature and luminosity show each to contain 15 solar masses. Spectra suggest an orbital period of not quite a year, this and the masses rendering them an actual 3 astronomical units apart. Twin Hadar also has a fourth magnitude sibling 1.3 seconds of arc away that, because of the brightness difference, is difficult to see and study. A class B dwarf, Hadar- B is a grand star in its own right, a star of 5 solar masses 1500 times more luminous than the Sun; it only pales by comparison with Hadar (or the Hadars) proper.
"Leda and the Constellation Cygnus." Department of Engineering, University of Michigan. 17 February 1999 http://windows.ivv.nasa.gov/mythology/cygnus.html.
Brown dwarfs are objects in space that sit between the lines of being a star and a planet. This object is dim and hard to distinguish from low mass stars at the early stages of the dwarf’s life. They are often called failed stars because they start their life the same way as regular stars. However, in some stage, they just didn’t have enough mass gathered to generate the fusion-powered energy of a star. Scientists are certain that brown dwarfs are the missing link between stars and planets but the formations of dwarfs are still a mystery.
After recognizing that Rick Riordan’s novels from the Percy Jackson series would not suffice as research, I began my development of knowledge on Perseus and Pegasus with research. Beginning with the magazines Sky & Telescope and Astronomy and the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, I viewed countless photographs of the constellations before turning to other websites to learn about the mythology and other basic information.
For many years astronomers and people alike have constantly heard about the observations and records of the Chinese and Europeans. No other culture can provide as much information as that gathered by the Chinese and Europeans, but there are many other cultures that observed and recorded the night sky, one of those being the Native Americans. During the last fifteen to twenty years archaeoastronomers have uncovered much concerning the beliefs and records of Native Americans. Unfortunately, the methods of keeping records of astronomical events were not as straight forward as the Chinese and Europeans. The Native Americans had to use what they could to record what they observed. Their records were found on rock and cave drawings, stick notching, beadwork, pictures on animal skins and story telling. One of the few dateable events among the various records of Native Americans was the 1833 appearance of the Leonid meteor shower.
It’s a white giant and has a temperature of 7700 Kelvin. It’s a type A star that is 8.5 times brighter than the sun. It is most likely to be in the last stage of ordinary star-type life. Scientists are saying the sun’s older twin is found in the middle of Capricorn. Studying this star will help them see how the Earth’s sun will develop.
...orite with a color index of 4.4, making it a visually striking red star. Its magnitude ranges between 7.8 and 9.3 over 369 days.
2, Alter Dinsmore, Cleminshaw H. Clarence, Philips G John. Pictorial Astronomy. United States: Sidney Feinberg, 1963.
It was the year 2045, and a coalition of NASA, the ESA, JAXA (Japanese space agency), and ISRO (Indian Space Agency) combined their collective resources, brain power, and monetary funds to organize one of the most ambitious missions in human history: to send an interstellar probe to the Alpha Centauri system. The name the probe was given was Stella Nauta, meaning Star Sailor. The purpose of the Stella Nauta was to look for any undiscovered properties of the stars in the system, to discover any planets, moons, or asteroids orbiting in the triple star system and to determine whether any of the planets it may or may not discover harbor life and whether it could be a potentially habitable planet for humans in the future. Before we discuss what
Shklovskii, Iosif S. Stars: Their Birth, Life, and Death. Moscow: Central Press for Literature in Physics and Mathematics, 1975.
Human fascination with the stars is as ancient as Babylonians and has been suggested to be older than Stonehenge. From “be fruitful and multiply” to “live long and prosper,” the instinct to protect and propagate the species has manifested in religion, art, and the imaginations of countless individuals. As human understanding of space treks out of the fantastical and into the scientific, the realities of traveling through and living in space are becoming clearer. Exploring, investigating, and living in space pose an expansive series of problems. However, the solutions to the problems faced by mankind's desire to reach beyond the horizon, through the night sky, and into the stars are solutions that will help in all areas of life on Earth.
A prominent actress once said, “I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea… (Maggie Grace)”. That precise idea is certainly grasped in numerous Greek works, and when it comes to the myth of Perseus and Andromeda, it is something that cannot be questioned nor defeated. It pertains to the legend of two strangers, who come across one another by coincidence, when Andromeda, a beautiful princess, sees herself in trouble, and Perseus, son of Zeus, intertwines with her magnificent looks, and helps in her liberation. The love and affection they mutually have towards one another, can be depicted in the painting “Perseus and Andromeda”, painted in 1891 by
In astronomy, Orion is the brightest one of the constellations. It stretches across the celestial equator—the projection of the Earth's equator into the sky—and can therefore be observed from almost any part of the world. At a 10:00-PM observation of the sky in the middle latitudes, Orion first appears in the east in October, reaches its greatest height in mid-January, and drops below the western horizon in late March. Moreover, Orion is among the most spectacular constellations, with many bright stars and scores of fascinating stellar objects. It can be quickly distinguished by four bright stars arranged in a sloppy rectangle around three stars set in a line—the famous “belt” of Orion.
One thing us humans have never been able to fully understand is astronomy. Always an unexplained mystery, astronomy also serves as a way to keep time and predict the future. The word “astronomy” is defined as the study of heavenly bodies, meaning anything in the sky such as stars, galaxies, comets, planets, nebulae, and so on. Many people, if not everyone, are amazed by the night sky on a clear, moonless night. Astronomy dates back to ancient times when peoples such as the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Chinese kept written records of astronomical events and occurrences.
Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) is a central figure in the development of observational cosmology. From 1922 to 1936 Hubble solved four of the central problems in cosmology.