Key facts
- Constellation
- Puppis
- Right ascension
- 08 03 35.05
- Declination
- −40 ° 00 ′ 11.3 ″
- Apparent magnitude v
- 2.24 - 2.26
- Evolutionary stage
- Blue supergiant
- Spectral type
- O4If(n)p
- U b color index
- −1.09
- B v color index
- −0.27
- Variable type
- rotating ?
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Constellation
- Puppis
- Mass
- 56.1
- Variable-star type
- Alpha Cygni variable
- Image
- Zeta Puppis.png
Show 17 more facts
- spectral class
- O4F
- catalog code
- UBV M 13965
- apparent magnitude
- 2.254294
- different from
- naos
- right ascension
- 120.896031410
- declination
- -40.003147798
- effective temperature
- 37250
- parallax
- 3.01
- radial velocity
- -28.5
- epoch
- J2000.0
- surface gravity
- 4400
- absolute magnitude
- -6.23
- right ascension component of proper motion
- -30
- declination component of proper motion
- 11
- age estimated by a dating method
- 3.2
- stellar rotational velocity
- 198
- Commons category
- Zeta Puppis
via Wikidata · CC0
~7 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Zeta Puppis (ζ Puppis, abbreviated Zeta Pup, ζ Pup), formally named Naos /naʊs/, is the brightest star in the constellation of Puppis.
The spectral class of O4 means this is one of the hottest, and most luminous, stars visible to the naked eye. It is one of the sky's few naked-eye class O-type stars as well as one of the closest to Earth. It is a blue supergiant, one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way. Visually it is over 10,000 times brighter than the Sun, but its high temperature means that most of its radiation is in the ultraviolet and its bolometric luminosity is over 500,000 times that of the Sun. It is also the 72nd brightest star in terms of apparent magnitude from Earth. It is a runaway star, meaning it has an unusually large space velocity, probably caused by being ejected from a close binary system when its companion exploded as a supernova.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Zeta Puppis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.