Facts about Alphecca
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Alphecca's primary star possesses a particularly strong magnetic field that influences its stellar wind and contributes to observable brightness fluctuations detectable through ground-based telescopes.
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Every 32 hours, Alphecca's primary star completes a full rotation, causing periodic variations in its brightness that astronomers can detect from Earth.
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Within 17.15 days, Alphecca's companion star completes one full orbit, making it one of the closest binary pairs among naked-eye visible stars in the Northern Hemisphere.
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Alphecca's primary star rotates on its axis with a period of approximately 1.2 days, making it spin roughly 20 times faster than our Sun.
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Alphecca's primary star has a mass of roughly 2.6 solar masses, placing it among the more massive main-sequence stars visible to the naked eye from Earth.
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Binary eclipses of Alphecca occur when the companion star passes in front of the primary star, reducing the system's brightness by approximately 0.3 magnitudes as observed from Earth.
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In medieval Islamic astronomy, Alphecca was catalogued as Gemma by Latinized scholars, deriving from the Arabic term Al-Nīrah meaning 'the shining one'.
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Approximately 2,600 times more massive than Jupiter, Alphecca's primary star will eventually cool into a red dwarf over billions of years.
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Spectroscopic analysis reveals that Alphecca's primary star belongs to the spectral class A0V, indicating it is a main-sequence star despite its relatively advanced evolutionary stage.
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The star system Alphecca marks the brightest point in the constellation Corona Borealis, earning its designation as Alpha Coronae Borealis in the Bayer cataloging system.
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Alphecca's primary star is a white dwarf with a surface temperature approximately 8,500 Kelvin, making it hotter than our Sun despite being considerably smaller and older.
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Alphecca's binary companion star orbits every 17.15 days at a distance of approximately 0.23 astronomical units, causing eclipses visible from Earth.
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Located approximately 75 light-years from Earth, Alphecca shines with a luminosity about 17 times greater than our Sun.