Speedy Mic

Speedy Mic is an orange star, cooler than the Sun, in the constellation Microscopium. It is in the long, steady part of its life, making helium from hydrogen in its core, as the Sun is.

Fly to it in 3D

A drawing in the star's own colour, worked out from its measured colour index. It is not a photograph.

How far

170 light years

The light you see from Speedy Mic tonight set off about 170 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.

How bright

0.40 of a Sun

It gives out 40 per cent of the Sun's visible light. It is too faint to see without a telescope.

Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 9.44. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.

How hot

About 4,900 K

That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its colour, so it is a guide and not a measurement. It could be out by a few hundred degrees. 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.

Speedy MicThe Sun

Its names

Its own name: Speedy Mic
Hipparcos catalogue: HIP 102626
Henry Draper catalogue: HD 197890
Spectral type: K0V

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.