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This is a file from the Wikimedia Commons. The description on its description page there is shown below.Commons is a freely licensed media file repository. You can help.
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Description |
This picture is an artist's impression showing how the binary star system of Sirius A and its diminutive blue companion, Sirius B, might appear to an interstellar visitor. The large, bluish-white star Sirius A dominates the scene, while Sirius B is the small but very hot and blue white-dwarf star on the right. The two stars revolve around each other every 50 years. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. The Sirius system, only 8.6 light-years from Earth, is the fifth closest stellar system known. Sirius B is faint because of its tiny size. Its diameter is only 7,500 miles (about 12 thousand kilometres), slightly smaller than the size of our Earth. The Sirius system is so close to Earth that most of the familiar constellations would have nearly the same appearance as in our own sky. In this rendition, we see in the background the three bright stars that make up the Summer Triangle: Altair, Deneb, and Vega. Altair is the white dot above Sirius A; Deneb is the dot to the upper right; and Vega lies below Sirius B. But there is one unfamiliar addition to the constellations: our own Sun is the second-magnitude star, shown as a small dot just below and to the right of Sirius A. |
Source |
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0516b.html |
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Author |
NASA, ESA Credit: G. Bacon (STScI) |
Permission ( Reusing this image) |
see below
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This file is in the public domain because it was created by the European Space Agency and NASA. Hubble material is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that ESA and NASA is credited as the source of the material. The material was created for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre and for NASA by STScI under Contract NAS5-26555. or . |
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File history
Click on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time.
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Date/Time |
Dimensions |
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current |
17:15, 10 December 2007 |
4,000×3,000 (4.11 MB) |
DENker |
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12:48, 25 December 2005 |
4,000×3,000 (2.32 MB) |
Superborsuk |
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File links
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