Adopting
![Adopting a star
I've been making observations of the SDSS star catalogue.
[An image of a Triangle-person, starting through a telescope into a computer screen filled with a large table]
And I found a star with an odd spectrum.
[An image of a Triangle person with two pointers, one pointing left to a spectrogram labeled "normal star", the other pointing right to a spectrogram labeled "GSC 06209-00747". The spectrum on the left has three significant dips, while the one on the right has two dips and one peak, poking out of the graph. The right peak is labeled "Hα"]
It has some very, very excited Hydrogen!
[An image of three hydrogen atoms, looking excitedly happy, with lightning zapping around]
Turns out it's a special emission-line star...
[An image of the Triangle person flying through space, reaching towards a large star shown in the background. The star in the background is dark red, with protuberances extruding into space and a few black spots on the surface.]
...so I decided to adopt it!](/images/251-adopting@1x.png)
Adopting a star
I’ve been making observations of the SDSS star catalogue.
[An image of a Triangle-person, starting through a telescope into a computer screen filled with a large table]
And I found a star with an odd spectrum.
[An image of a Triangle person with two pointers, one pointing left to a spectrogram labeled “normal star”, the other pointing right to a spectrogram labeled “GSC 06209-00747”. The spectrum on the left has three significant dips, while the one on the right has two dips and one peak, poking out of the graph. The right peak is labeled “Hα”]
It has some very, very excited Hydrogen!
[An image of three hydrogen atoms, looking excitedly happy, with lightning zapping around]
Turns out it’s a special emission-line star…
[An image of the Triangle person flying through space, reaching towards a large star shown in the background. The star in the background is dark red, with protuberances extruding into space and a few black spots on the surface.]
…so I decided to adopt it!
I really stared at a catalogue - essentially, a large table of numbers - and found this interesting unusual star GSC 06209-00747.
This is really how a lot of modern astronomy is done. Huge telescopes sweep the sky in surveys, collecting massive amount of information. Scientists process this information in various ways to find interesting objects in the sky.
They can do interesting science with just that information, but if a particular object is exceptionally interesting, they may try to obtain time on a telescope to investigate it closer.
GSC 06209-00747 turns out to be special, because it’s so magnetically active that its hydrogen atoms get excited (energized), and radiate red light at the H-alpha wavelength of roughly 656nm.
This is different to regular stars like the Sun, which instead of emitting red light at this frequency, absorb it - resulting in “dips” (dark frequency regions) in the spectrogram.
Because we have measured GSC 06209-00747 multiple times from different parts of the Earth’s orbit we get to see it stereoscopically, so we can triangulate it’s distance to about 430 light years (quite close!).
The distance measurements over time also give us information on the star’s radial velocity (speed of movement away or towards us). Measuring the star’s position across time gives us information about it’s movement sideways (proper motion). Together, we can calculate the star’s speed as 18.8 km/s compared to the Sun.
Knowing the distance and its light intensity we can figure out that it’s a reddish dwarf star. This is confirmed by the shape of the light spectrum, revaling it as a K5 stellar type, with temperature of about 4300K. It’s smaller than the Sun, less bright, and is in stable part of it’s lifecycle. Because of this stability, and because of a slower rate of the fuel consumption, it will live for a very long time.
The hydrogen emission line (“peak”) signifies the star is magnetically active, which may be a sign of its young age. This is confirmed by it’s low relative velocity and proximity to us - making it likely that it’s a young disk star. This is a category of stars that were just born in the star-forming area of Milky Way, are roughly in the galactic plane (in the middle layer of the galactic “pancake”), and are still moving together with the galaxy’s rotation.