#7: SIRIUS – THE WINTER SPARKLER

Sirius, the Dog Star, is the brightest star of the constellation Canis Major, the "Greater Dog" in Latin. You simply can’t miss it: just cast a gaze toward the southeast part of the sky.

According to Burnham’s Celestial Handbook other names for it include "The Sparkling One" or "The Scorching One." The star appears a brilliant white with a tinge of blue, but when the air is unsteady, or when it is low to the horizon it seems to flicker and splinter with all the colors of the rainbow. At a distance of just 8.7 light years, Sirius is the fifth-nearest known star. Among the naked-eye stars, it is the nearest of all, with the sole exception of Alpha Centauri.

Train a telescope on Sirius tonight and enjoy the beauty of this blue-white gem.

Over thousands of years, Sirius appears to move in a wavy line across the sky. In 1862, Alvan G. Clark first saw Sirius B, also known as "the Pup," the companion star responsible for the wiggle. The Pup is a star of magnitude 8.5; only one ten-thousandth as bright as Sirius A.

The Pup pursues a 50-year orbit around Sirius A and is always a challenging object for amateur astronomers to see. The Pup is a strangely dense star known as a white dwarf. In fact, it packs 98 percent of one solar mass into a body just 2 percent of the Sun’s diameter. To do that, Sirius B must have a density 90,000 times that of the Sun. A teaspoon of this star material would weigh about 2 tons.

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