The moon embraces the star Scorpio

Weather of Arabia - The sky of the Arab world witnessed, at dawn today, Wednesday, before sunrise, the conjunction of the moon with the star Antares towards the southeastern horizon, which was visible to the naked eye.

(Simulation of the conjunction of the Moon with the star Antares, the red giant star, and the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius)

And according to what the Astronomical Society in Jeddah said in a post on its Facebook page, the heart of the scorpion is the brightest star among the stars of Scorpio, and it is a giant red star, so that the sun is nothing compared to it.

She explained that this star has a mass between 15-18 times the mass of the sun, and its radius exceeds 448,793,612 km, so if the heart of Scorpio were in the place of the sun, its surface would extend beyond the orbit of Mars, and cover approximately 60% of the distance to Jupiter.

The association indicated that Antares is about 550 light-years away from planet Earth, and it is only about 12 million years old, and it is in the autumn of its life, pointing out that stars such as Antares, which are in the final stages of their life, lose their mass quickly, and this leads to The gases flow spirally around the star.

And she continued in her publication, that the red stars that can be seen with the naked eye are somewhat rare, noting that all the bright red stars that we see in the night sky with the naked eye are either red giants (such as the star Aldebaran), or huge red giants ( such as the stars Antares and Betelgeuse).

The Jeddah astronomer noted that the red color of the heart of the scorpion indicates its low surface temperature, which is about 3,200 degrees Celsius, in contrast to the sun's surface temperature of 5,700 degrees Celsius, which is yellow.

She added that the matter differs when comparing the heart of Scorpio with a very hot star, such as the blue-white defenseless fish, which has a surface temperature of about 22,100 degrees Celsius.

It is worth noting that the heart of Scorpio, like all stars, rises 4 minutes early every night or two hours early at the end of each month, as a result of the Earth's movement around the sun.

And by the month of October, this star will be difficult to see on the southwestern horizon, due to its occurrence in the light of the sunset twilight.

If you want to spot the star Antares, look it up on the Stellarium website for an accurate chart of the star's location in the night sky.