Shaula
Shaula is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Scorpius. It is a subgiant: a star just beginning to leave the long, steady part of its life.
How far
570 light years
The light you see from Shaula tonight set off about 570 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 Everything we know about it is that much out of date.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
6,000 Suns
It gives out 6,000 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 1.62. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
Hotter than 14,000 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.
ShaulaThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Shaula
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Lambda Scorpii
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 85927
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 158926
- Spectral type
- B1.5IV
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.