8 Ursae Minoris
star in the constellation Ursa Minor
8 Ursae Minoris is a 7th-magnitude red clump star in Ursa Minor. The star is unusually rich in lithium, with an abundance of A = 2.0±0.2 dex.
In the 2019 NameExoWorlds competition, the star was assigned to contestants in South Korea. It was named Baekdu after Paektu Mountain, the tallest mountain in North Korea.
Planetary system
One exoplanet was discovered in 2015 by the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory. It has a tight 93-day orbit at a distance of about 0.5 AU, which is unusually close for a giant host star — it should have been consumed during a previous expansion to 0.7 AU. It is officially named Halla after Hallasan, the tallest mountain in South Korea. There is also a stellar activity cycle of 65 days, and possibly a second companion orbiting at a distance of at least 5 AU.
A 2023 study suggests that 8 Ursae Minoris was initially a binary star with star masses of 1.23 and 0.86 M☉. When the heavier star reached the end of the main sequence about 4.2–5.6 Gyr, it expanded until it dumped all of its mass onto the secondary and became a helium white dwarf. The other star eventually engulfed this white dwarf at around 8.6 Gyr, causing helium burning to start prematurely and forming the star that we know today. The planet may have survived the episode as a former circumbinary planet, or it may have formed from material ejected during the stellar merger.
The public source identifies “8 Ursae Minoris” as star in the constellation Ursa Minor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ursae, Minoris and star.
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This entry incorporates text from “8 Ursae Minoris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.