3 Sagittarii
3 Sagittarii is a yellow-white star, a little hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Sagittarius. It is a bright giant: a star that has left the steady part of its life and swollen up.
How far
990 light years
The light you see from 3 Sagittarii tonight set off about 990 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
Distances this great are hard to measure, and this one could be out by a fifth or more.
How bright
1,200 Suns
It gives out 1,200 times as much visible light as the Sun. It can be seen by eye away from bright lights.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 4.53. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 6,300 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its spectral type, F7II, with a standard table of how hot stars of each type are. It is a guide and not a measurement, and could be out by a tenth or so. For stars as hot as this, colour is a poor thermometer, because most of their light is ultraviolet, so the type is the better guide. The Sun's is 5,772 K. Hotter stars are bluer and cooler stars are redder, the same way a poker in a fire goes from red to white.
3 SagittariiThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
It has no name of its own. Its name by constellation is a number and the constellation it is in, from the catalogue of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal.
- By constellation (Flamsteed)
- 3 Sagittarii
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 87072
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 161592
- Spectral type
- F7II
Where this comes from
Distance, brightness, colour and spectral type are from the HYG star database, version 4.4, by David Nash, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Its distances are those measured by the Hipparcos satellite. The temperature is read from the spectral type with the table of Pecaut and Mamajek (2013), and the words are written for this site.
To read more: Colour and brightness, How stars live and die, Measuring distance.