Many people reported a red and white flashing star beside the moon last night and wondered what it was. What if I told you it was a star 44 times the size of our sun and 425 times brighter but its 65 light years away. It was the star Alderbaran which is known the eye of the bull in the open star cluster Hyades which is part of the constellation Taurus. It is about 65 light years away with a magnitude of 0.87 and is an orange giant which has burned all of its Hydrogen in its core leading to core compression from gravity and helium fusion ignition through the triple-alpha fusion process. Hydrogen fusion is now occurring in a shell around the helium core. This has caused it to expand to 44.2 times the diameter of our Sun so roughly 61 million km wide. It is now about 425 times brighter than our sun. It has the appearance of being the brightest star in the Hyades cluster but actually Hyades is more than twice the distance at about 150 light years. It appeared closest to the moon last night around 7pm and slowly moved away as the night went on.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 13:03:59 +0000
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