Get to know the brightest stars of the summer?

Arabia Weather - With the advent of summer, interest increases in observing the night sky and identifying the prominent stars that humans have relied on throughout history as signs to guide them in their homes and travels. What are the brightest stars that can be seen? How can they be located? Here's what you should know about this topic.

The number of stars that can be seen

In ideal conditions, the naked eye can see about 10,000 stars. However, more than 3,000 stars can rarely be seen due to light pollution and visibility being limited to a certain part of the planetarium depending on our location on the Earth's surface.

But the number of stars about which scientists have data far exceeds this number, as researchers estimate that our galaxy contains about 100 billion stars, most of which are not bright enough to discover. The Gaia probe, launched by the European Space Agency in 2013, was able to record measurements of more than 1.6 billion stars, equivalent to only 1% of the stars in the galaxy.

The brightest stars in the summer sky

• North Star

Many people believe that the North Star - or Pole Star - is the brightest star in the summer night sky, because it is one of the few stars that can be easily located. It is located along the imaginary line passing through the Earth's poles or the Earth's axis, so it is used in navigation to determine the direction of the north, but this famous star is not actually among the brightest stars in the sky in the summer.

• The spearfish

Arcturus is the brightest star in the constellation Boötes and the fourth brightest star visible from Earth, according to the Star Facts website. The location of this star can be easily determined by first finding the Ursa Major constellation that is high in the night sky, then looking for its tail of 4 stars and following the path of the imaginary line passing through it until reaching a very bright star in its area, it is the spearfish. This star is located on It is approximately 37 light years away and is an orange giant that is about 215 times larger than the Sun.

• Summer triangle

Three other bright stars appear in the summer sky, forming what is known to astronomers as the “Summer Triangle.” These stars are Vega, Deneb, and Altair. The triangle rises in the east after dark, and soars high at midnight in July and August. Through this triangle, the disk of our galaxy (the Milky Way) can be seen interspersed with it. A large number of bright star clusters, in addition to some of the most famous planetary clouds, such as the Ring Nebula and Messier 27.

• vega

The Eagle star is the brightest star in the Triangle, and it is the fifth brightest star in the entire sky. According to Space.com, it is located 25 light-years from our solar system. It is a young star, no more than 450 million years old. About a tenth of the age of the Sun, the eagle in the past was the North Star during the 12th millennium BC, and it will return to that again about 12,000 years later. It can be seen in the summer near the zenith (directly above our heads) in the mid-northern latitudes during the evening.

See also:

Jordanian Astronomical Society: Three astronomical observatories, one of which is Arab, films the Chinese probe as it returns from the moon

On the day of the summer solstice.. Do the hours of day and night differ on other planets such as Earth?

Sources:

aljazeera