Elkurud
Elkurud is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Columba.
How far
720 light years
The light you see from Elkurud tonight set off about 720 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 Everything we know about it is that much out of date.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
430 Suns
It gives out 430 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 5.00. 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.
ElkurudThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Elkurud
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Theta Columbae
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 29034
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 42167
- Spectral type
- B8:IV
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.