NR Canis Majoris
star
NR Canis Majoris is a binary star system in the southern constellation of Canis Major, located to the east of Sirius and Gamma Canis Majoris near the constellation border with Puppis. It has a yellow-white hue and is dimly visible to the naked eye with a combined apparent visual magnitude that fluctuates around 5.60. It is located at a distance of approximately 297 light years from the Sun based on parallax. The system is drifting closer to the Sun with a radial velocity of −29 km/s, and in about three million years it is predicted to approach within 14.1+4.7−4.0 ly. At that time, the star will become the brightest in the night sky, potentially reaching magnitude −0.88.
The magnitude 5.66 primary component is an F-type main-sequence star with a stellar classification of F2V. The star was discovered to be a variable star when the Hipparcos data was analyzed. It was given its variable star designation, NR Canis Majoris, in 1999. It is a Delta Scuti variable that varies by a few hundredths of a magnitude over roughly 16 hours. The star is an estimated 1.5 billion years old. It has a high rate of spin with a projected rotational velocity of 185 km/s, which is giving the star an equatorial bulge that is estimated to be 8% larger than the polar radius.
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This entry incorporates text from “NR Canis Majoris” 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.