Aldebaran is a giant star ten times larger than the Sun. It has been observed since ancient times, there are legends about it, and this is not surprising, since it is one of the brightest stars in the sky. Humans have sent, even unwittingly, a probe that will reach her after a very long time.

A giant with a super story, which the Arabs called “al-Dabaran”

Aldebaran is a giant star 50 times larger than the Sun. We can see it as a bright spot in the Taurus constellation.

Aldebaran is located 68 light-years from Earth, and the red giant has fascinated humans since ancient times. It is one of the stars written about in the Middle Ages, and astronomers from almost every region of the globe have proposed theories to explain its slightly reddish hue. This appears to be related to the star’s size and relatively low surface temperature.

It is 150 times brighter than the Sun and has a lower surface temperature than the Sun: 3,700 degrees Celsius versus 5,500 degrees Celsius.

It is the 14th brightest visible to the naked eye in winter and spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and is also called the “eye of the Bull” because it is in the constellation Taurus.

The name comes from Arabic and means “follower”, probably referring to a hunter who followed his prey, one hypothesis being that the “prey” would be the group of stars we call the Pleiades, which in the past was personified as a group of birds.

In ancient Persia, Aldebaran had the honor of being included in the “Four Royal Stars” along with Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.

In Hindu mythology, Aldebaran was sometimes depicted as a young woman named Rohini, who, according to legend, was haunted by her female father, who turned into an antelope and whose father was a deer. Other ancient peoples associated the star with a deity that brings rain.

The Sioux people of the Dakotas had a legend that Aldebaran was a star that fell to Earth and killed a serpent, leading to the formation of the Mississippi River. This star was also present in obscure neo-Nazi books, which presented it as the place of origin of the “Aryan race”.

Ancient Greek astronomers called her Lampadia, which means “torch-like” or “torch-bearer”.

The star is also called Alpha Taurus and has an exoplanet nearby called Aldebaran b, which is 6.5 times larger than Jupiter and has a surface temperature of over 1,200 degrees Celsius, receiving a lot of cosmic radiation from the star during its expansion. The exoplanet was discovered in 1993 and the discovery was confirmed in 2015. There is no mention of the existence of life forms on this planet.

A probe that will reach Aldebaran in two million years

In March 1972, NASA launched a probe that would go down in history and become the first in space. Well, this probe is headed for Aldebaran, where it will arrive in two million years. The Pioneer 10 mission was supposed to last 21 months, but NASA was able to maintain contact with the probe for 30 years, and at the time of “Goodbye” it was more than 12 billion km from Earth, that is, 80 times more. than the Earth-Sun distance.

Pioneer 10 was the fastest human-made object at the time, reaching speeds of 53,000 km/h shortly after launch and 126,000 km/h near Jupiter. In 1976, the probe approached the orbit of Saturn, and in 1983 – to the orbit of the planet Neptune. And these were the first people to explore space. The Pioneer 10 science mission lasted until 1995, and the last communication was in 2003.

It arrived at the Moon 11 hours after launch, and in the region of the planet Mars, 80 million km away, it arrived three months later. In the summer of 197, it reached the asteroid belt, becoming the first man-made object to cross it. It arrived at Jupiter 21 months after launch, becoming the first probe to transmit detailed images of the gas giant back to Earth.

No one will know if Pioneer 10 will actually reach Aldebaran, because we no longer have the ability to communicate with the probe, and we have no way of knowing if there will be humans on Earth in two million years. But it is interesting to think that a man-made object will come close to an ultra-distant star that people have observed since ancient times/

Why do so many stars have Arabic names?

The names of the most famous stars are picturesque, because they come from the Arabic language, whether it is Betelgeuse, Algol or Deneb or Zubenelgenubi, Zubenelhakrabi and Zubeneshamali!

Between 800 and 1200 Muslim astronomers and mathematicians built observatories, developed modern instruments for measuring time, and found new methods of analysis and calculation in mathematics.

The Arabs also perfected an instrument that had existed since ancient Greece – the astrolabe – which became a portable instrument in Muslim times. The astrolabe was an instrument that allowed astronomers and navigators to measure the position of the moon and stars in the sky, and from this information, the time could be deduced, which was extremely useful for Muslims of the time to know what time to pray.

Stars – How many are there and what happens in them

Thousands of stars can be seen with the naked eye, and billions with a telescope. The distances of more than 100,000 stars have been measured, and the most distant stars that can be seen with the naked eye are more than 2,000 light-years away. The nearest star is the Sun, and the second is Alpha Centauri, which is 40,000 billion km away.

Astronomers classify stars by size, temperature, color, and brightness. When discussing the size of a star, they usually mean the mass of that star or the amount of material it contains.

A star’s mass determines all other characteristics: how hot it is, what color it is, and how long it will last. Massive stars are hot and blue, small stars are cold and red. The smallest stars are as little as one-tenth the mass of the Sun, cold, dim, and red, and can exist for thousands of billions of years because they burn slowly and steadily.

The most massive stars also have hundreds of times the mass of the Sun, are hot, bright and blue, but burn up quickly and die young, sometimes even after “just” a few million years. When you consider that the universe is over 13 billion years old, a few million means nothing in the “cosmic calendar”.

Based on the heat each emits, astronomers classify stars into seven general star types, from hottest to coolest: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. The bigger the star, the more pressure it exerts on its center, so hydrogen it melts stronger there. Therefore, large stars are brighter and hotter, but they live shorter, because they burn faster.

The disappearance of the giant is dramatic and violent, practically such a star destroys itself.

A star gets its energy from nuclear fusion, combining two hydrogen atoms into one helium atom. In the core of a star, the temperature and pressure are so high that atoms simply compress and merge.