* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: LHS 2520

Blobrana · L

Superman Home: Planet Krypton 'Found' in Sky

Superman is, of course, a fictional character, the stuff of comics and movies. But that didn't stop DC Comics, which owns the Superman franchise, from enlisting the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to "find" the location of his lost home planet, Krypton.
It's in the constellation Corvus the raven, in the southern sky not far from Virgo and Hydra. The planet Krypton - not that it ever existed - would have orbited a red dwarf star called LHS 2520, Tyson concluded. The star is 27.1 light-years from Earth.
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Blobrana · L

The star is LHS 2520, a red dwarf in the southern constellation of Corvus (at the center of the picture here). It's an M3.5 dwarf, meaning it has about a quarter of the Sun's mass, a third its diameter, roughly half the Sun's temperature, and a luminosity of a mere 1% of our Sun's. It's only 27 light years away - very close on the scale of the galaxy - but such a dim bulb you need a telescope to see it at all (for any astronomers out there, the coordinates are RA: 12h 10m 5.77s, Dec: -15° 4m 17.9 s).
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