Meet a star / Puppis

Tureis

Tureis is a yellow-white star, a little hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Puppis. It is a bright giant: a star that has left the steady part of its life and swollen up.

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

How far

64 light years

The light you see from Tureis tonight set off about 64 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.

How bright

24 Suns

It gives out 24 times as much visible light as the Sun. It is easy to see by eye on a clear night.

Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 2.83. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.

How hot

About 6,600 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.

TureisThe Sun

In your sky now

Working it out…

Its names

Its own name
Tureis
By constellation (Bayer)
Rho Puppis
Hipparcos catalogue
HIP 39757
Henry Draper catalogue
HD 67523
Spectral type
F2mF5IIp

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.