Star profile
Tau Boötis
What is Tau Boötis
Tau Boötis is a yellow-white star just over fifty light-years away, famous for hosting one of the earliest confirmed exoplanets, a gas giant discovered in 1996 that orbits in barely three days. It is also a binary, whose small red dwarf companion takes thousands of years to complete a single revolution. The pair has become a small laboratory where pioneering techniques to detect planetary atmospheres have been tested.
Where it is and when to see it
Tau Boötis lies in the northern celestial hemisphere. It is visible to the naked eye under a dark sky. Its best month of the year is April: the Sun sits at the opposite point of the sky and the star culminates around midnight. How high it climbs above the horizon depends on the latitude you watch from.
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The signature wall
Stelvia's sky works like a signature wall: anyone can leave their name and a message on a real star, and that signature goes up on the map for everyone to read. Signing is free.
A signature without a lock can be replaced by someone else's. The lock makes the signature permanent and lets you choose a symbolic name for the star, always shown next to the star's catalogue identifier. How the lock works
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A public signature from a real person. The chosen name is a symbolic denomination within Stelvia, with no official standing or IAU recognition: the sky is not for sale and belongs to no one.
Astronomical data for Tau Boötis
- Constellation
- Boötes
- Apparent magnitude
- 4.50
- Distance
- 50.9 light years
- Coordinates (J2000)
- RA 206.816° · Dec 17.457°
- Catalogue
- HIP 67275 · HD 120136
A symbolic commemorative gift: neither the signature nor the chosen name implies ownership of the star or recognition by the IAU.
Other stars in Boötes
Boötes has 88 stars in Stelvia's catalogue. Here are a few of them.
- ArcturusAlpha Boötis-0.05
- IzarEpsilon Boötis2.35
- MuphridEta Boötis2.68
- AlkaluropsMu 1 Boötis4.31
- Sigma Boötis4.47
- Pi 1 Boötis4.49
- Psi Boötis4.52
- Kappa 2 Boötis4.53