Rigel
Rigel is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Orion. It is a supergiant: a very heavy star, swollen to an enormous size and near the end of its life.
How far
860 light years
The light you see from Rigel tonight set off about 860 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 Everything we know about it is that much out of date.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
52,000 Suns
It gives out 52,000 times as much visible light as the Sun. From the Earth it is the seventh brightest star in the night sky. It is one of the brightest stars in the whole sky, easy to see even from a town.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 0.18. 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, B8Ia, 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.
RigelThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Rigel
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Beta Orionis
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 24436
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 34085
- Spectral type
- B8Ia
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.