The brightest star in the Taurus constellation and the 14th brightest star in the night sky is Alpha Tauri. It is located in the zodiac constellation of Taurus, approximately 65 light-years away. It has 518 times the luminosity of the Sun (153 times in visible light). It is the brightest star in the constellation and one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky, with an average apparent magnitude of 0.87.
Alpha Tauri has a diameter of more than 50 million kilometers. It is a massive star located in the zodiac constellation Taurus, approximately 65 light-years from the Sun. It is thought to be home to Aldebaran b, a planet several times the mass of Jupiter.
Alpha Tauri is the brightest star in the constellation and is one of the brightest stars in the nighttime sky. It is one of the easiest stars to find in the night sky, partly due to its brightness and partly due to being near one of the more noticeable asterisms in the sky.
With a surface temperature of 3,900 K, Alpha Tauri is cooler than the Sun, but its radius is about 44 times that of the Sun, making it 400 times more luminous. If this star were to replace the Sun in the center of the solar system, its surface would extend halfway to Mercury’s orbit and across 20 degrees of our sky. It rotates slowly, taking 520 days to complete one rotation. The helium-burning stage typically lasts hundreds of millions of years or about 700 million years for a star with 1.7 solar masses and a mass equal to the Sun. The planetary exploration probe Pioneer 10 is heading in the general direction of the star and should make its closest approach in about two million years.
Within the next few million years, Alpha Tauri will reach about 800 solar luminosities. It is one of the easiest stars to find in the night sky, due in part to its brightness and in part to its proximity to one of the more visible asterisms in the sky. It will eventually lose much of its current mass due to its strong stellar wind and expel its outer envelope to form a planetary nebula, leaving a white dwarf behind. The first bright star encountered after following the three stars of Orion’s belt in the opposite direction of Sirius is Aldebaran.
Because the star happens to be in the line of sight between the Earth and the Hyades, it appears to be the brightest member of the open cluster, but the cluster that forms the bull’s-head-shaped asterism is more than twice as far away, at about 150 light-years.
Alpha Tauri is located near the ecliptic, which is the apparent path of the Sun, Moon, and planets across the sky, and is frequently occulted by the Moon. The occultation makes it simple to estimate the size of a star by taking into account the amount of time it is obscured and viewing it from various angles. Every year on June 1st, the star aligns with the Sun.
