56 Arietis
56 Arietis is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Aries.
How far
500 light years
The light you see from 56 Arietis tonight set off about 500 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 Everything we know about it is that much out of date.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
100 Suns
It gives out 100 times as much visible light as the Sun. It can just be seen by eye from a really dark place.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 5.78. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
Hotter than 11,000 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its colour, so it is a guide and not a measurement. For stars as blue as this one, colour is a poor thermometer: most of their light is ultraviolet, which the eye and this sum do not see, and the true figure can be far higher. 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.
56 ArietisThe 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)
- 56 Arietis
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 14893
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 19832
- Spectral type
- B9p Si
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 worked out here from the colour with the formula of Ballesteros (2012), and the words are written for this site.
To read more: Colour and brightness, How stars live and die, Measuring distance.