Gienah
Gienah is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Corvus. It is a giant: a star that has used up the hydrogen in its core and swollen up.
How far
150 light years
The light you see from Gienah tonight set off about 150 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
How bright
180 Suns
It gives out 180 times as much visible light as the Sun. It is one of the hundred brightest stars in the night sky. It is easy to see by eye on a clear night.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 2.58. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 12,000 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its spectral type, B8III, 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.
GienahThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Gienah
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Gamma Corvi
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 59803
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 106625
- Spectral type
- B8III
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.