Is Sirius B similar to the Sun?
Is Sirius B similar to the Sun?
While Sirius A, the main component, is a large white star twice as massive as the sun, Sirius B, the companion, is a white dwarf, about as massive as the sun, but very small – about the same volume as the Earth.
Do white dwarfs have similar mass to the Sun?
A white dwarf is very dense: Its mass is comparable to that of the Sun, while its volume is comparable to that of Earth. White dwarfs are thought to be the final evolutionary state of stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star or black hole. This includes over 97% of the other stars in the Milky Way.
What is Sirius B’s luminosity compared to the Sun?
The bright component of the binary is a blue-white star 25.4 times as luminous as the Sun. It has a radius 1.71 times that of the Sun and a surface temperature of 9,940 kelvins (K), which is more than 4,000 K higher than that of the Sun.
Is Sirius B bigger than the Sun?
Based on the Hubble measurements of the redshift, Sirius B has a mass that is 98 percent that of our own Sun. Sirius itself has a mass two times that of the Sun and a diameter of 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers).
What is the mass of Sirius A?
3.978 × 10^30 kg (2 M☉)
Sirius A/Mass
Is Sirius BA white dwarf?
Sirius B, a white dwarf, is very faint because of its tiny size, only 12 000 kilometres in diameter. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun.
Which of the following is an accurate comparison between a white dwarf star like Sirius B and the Sun?
Which of the following is an accurate comparison between a white dwarf star (like Sirius B) and the Sun? The white dwaf has the same size as the Sun, but a much smaller mass.
Is Sirius B white dwarf?
Sirius B, a white dwarf, is very faint because of its tiny size, only 12 000 kilometres in diameter. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. They have exhausted their nuclear fuel sources and have collapsed down to a very small size. Sirius B is about 10 000 times fainter than Sirius A.
What is the mass of Sirius compared to the sun?
Sirius A is about twice as massive as the Sun ( M ☉) and has an absolute visual magnitude of +1.42. It is 25 times as luminous as the Sun, but has a significantly lower luminosity than other bright stars such as Canopus or Rigel. The system is between 200 and 300 million years old.
Why was Sirius B called a white dwarf?
Because of the white color of the star, it was called a “white dwarf” star. This was an extraordinary discovery. It meant that the same amount of material contained in the Sun is packed into a volume one millionth the size of the Sun. The density of material in Sirius B must be a million times denser than that of ordinary matter.
How did Hubble measure the mass of Sirius B?
Now, an international team of astronomers has used the keen eye of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to isolate the light from the white dwarf, called Sirius B. The new results allow them to measure precisely the white dwarf’s mass based on how its intense gravitational field alters the wavelengths of light emitted by the star.
How big is Sirius B compared to the Earth?
Also, the method used to determine the white dwarf’s mass relies on one of the key predictions of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity; that light loses energy when it attempts to escape the gravity of a compact star.” Sirius B has a diameter of 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers), less than the size of Earth, but is much denser.
Why is the luminosity of Sirius B so low?
However, its luminosity is only about 2 percent that of the Sun. The luminosity of a star depends on its surface temperature and its diameter. The abnormally low luminosity of Sirius B can be explained by assuming that Sirius B has a very low temperature or a very small diameter.