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hello, I wonder
if you could help me? for some time now i have been trying to find
the diameter of a star in the LMC. The catalogue i d is HD33579.
I believe it's in a nebula which spawns supergiants.
Reply
HD33579 is an A-type hypergiant star, which means that it is one
of the largest stars known. It is evolving away from the Main Sequence
(where most stars are located, and where the star is powered by
the conversion of Hydrogen to Helium in the core), and is a variable
star which changes in brightness roughly every 100 days. This is
thought to be due to huge shock waves moving over the surface of
the star, occurring roughly every 100 days apart. Hypergiants are
massive (>25 times the mass of the Sun) with enormous mass-loss
rates (they are shedding their outer atmospheres at a prodigious
rate) as they start their evolution away from the stable Main Sequence.
I cannot find any specific radius measurements for this individual
star, but given the spectral type (A) I would expect it to be somewhere
in the region of 50-60 times the Sun's radius.
Paul Roche
Final Frontier
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