Polaris is about five times as massive as the sun, new observations reveal. That’s around 50 percent heavier than what an earlier study found.
, astronomers report in work submitted July 12 to arXiv.org. That value, calculated from the motion of a much fainter star that orbits the luminary, is nearly 50 percent heavier than a recent estimate of 3.45 solar masses.
Mass profoundly affects stellar life: The more mass a star has, the faster it burns its fuel and the sooner it dies. The earlier mass estimate had suggested that the North Star,). The new estimate means the star formed more recently than this, but no one has yet calculated a revised age., when astronomer Nancy Evans and her colleagues glimpsed it with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Because the close companion star takes three decades to revolve around the main star, most of the orbit has now been observed, bolstering the reliability of the mass estimate. “These things take a long time,” says Evans, of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.). The stars are large and luminous — Polaris is 46 times as wide as the sun — and nearing the ends of their lives. Notably, they expand and contract, which makes their brightness wax and wane.
“It’s extremely important to know the mass,” says Ed Guinan, an astronomer at Villanova University in Pennsylvania who was not involved with the new work. That lets astronomers check their models of how Cepheids evolve and better understand these cosmic measuring rods. But “there’s only a few Cepheids that have masses determined.”
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