Alpha Camelopardalis
star in the constellation Camelopardalis
Alpha Camelopardalis is a blue hued star in the northern constellation of Camelopardalis. Its name is a Bayer designation that is Latinized from α Camelopardalis, and abbreviated Alpha Cam or α Cam. With an apparent visual magnitude of 4.3, it is visible to the naked eye as the third-brightest star in this not-very-prominent circumpolar constellation; the first and second-brightest stars being Beta Camelopardalis and CS Camelopardalis, respectively.
Description
Alpha Camelopardalis has a stellar classification of O9 Ia, with the 'Ia' luminosity class indicating that it is a luminous O-type blue supergiant. It is a massive star with 37.6 times the mass of the Sun and 32.5 times the Sun's radius. The effective temperature of the outer envelope is 29,000 K; much hotter than the Sun's effective temperature of 5,778 K, giving it the characteristic blue hue of an O-type star. It is emitting 676,000 times the luminosity of the Sun and is a weak X-ray emitter. It has a high rate of spin, showing a projected rotational velocity of 100 km/s.
Variations in the profiles of Alpha Camelopardalis' spectral lines are caused by fluctuations in the photosphere and stellar wind. This may be caused by non-radial pulsations.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alpha Camelopardalis” 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.