Image:Sirius A and B artwork.jpg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Size of this preview: 800 × 600 pixels
Full resolution (4,000 × 3,000 pixels, file size: 4.11 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg)
| This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. The description on its description page there is shown below.
|
| Description |
This picture is an artist's impression showing how the binary star system of Sirius A and its diminutive blue companion, Sirius B, might appear to an interstellar visitor. The large, bluish-white star Sirius A dominates the scene, while Sirius B is the small but very hot and blue white-dwarf star on the right. The two stars revolve around each other every 50 years. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. The Sirius system, only 8.6 light-years from Earth, is the fifth closest stellar system known. Sirius B is faint because of its tiny size. Its diameter is only 7,500 miles (about 12 thousand kilometres), slightly smaller than the size of our Earth. The Sirius system is so close to Earth that most of the familiar constellations would have nearly the same appearance as in our own sky. In this rendition, we see in the background the three bright stars that make up the Summer Triangle: Altair, Deneb, and Vega. Altair is the white dot above Sirius A; Deneb is the dot to the upper right; and Vega lies below Sirius B. But there is one unfamiliar addition to the constellations: our own Sun is the second-magnitude star, shown as a small dot just below and to the right of Sirius A. |
|---|---|
| Source | |
| Date | |
| Author |
NASA, ESA |
| Permission (Reusing this image) |
see below |
 |
This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and the European Space Agency. Hubble material is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that NASA and ESA is credited as the source of the material. The material was created for NASA by STScI under Contract NAS5-26555 and for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. [1] or [2]. |
 |
File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
| Date/Time | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| current | 17:15, 10 December 2007 | 4,000×3,000 (4.11 MB) | DENker | (higher quality image) |
| 12:48, 25 December 2005 | 4,000×3,000 (2.32 MB) | Superborsuk | (An Artist's Impression of Sirius A and Sirius B Source: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2005/36/image/b) |
