The Most Extreme Stars In The Universe

We will offer you a “Guinness Book of Records” of the most extreme stars currently known in our universe: we will make a review of stars that for some of their peculiarities can be considered record stars.

Let’s start with the fastest star. But how fast? And with respect to what?

The stars are not still, but they move around the center of our galaxy; the Sun also moves around the galactic center, in around 200 million years. This implies that, over the course of a human life, the stars remain more or less in the same position with respect to how our grandparents knew them; but over millions of years, the stars that we will see at night from our planet will change their position with respect to how we know them today, and therefore the constellations that our very distant descendants will observe will be completely different from the current ones.

To identify the movement of a star in the sky, two types of velocity are defined: the radial velocity, which indicates how much a star approaches or goes away from the Earth, and the proper motion, which instead is the displacement of a star measured on the celestial sphere, and is the parameter used to determine how fast a star is. The record belongs to Barnard’s star, which moves almost exactly towards North at a speed of 10.4 arcseconds per year.

Just to give an idea of the speed of its motion, we can also say that it moves the width of the full moon every 200 years. Barnard’s star was discovered in 1916 by the US astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard, hence the name; it is a star of magnitude 9.5 observable in the direction of the constellation of Ophiuchus, 4 degrees West of the bright star Beta Ophiuchi. Due to its magnitude, it is not visible to the unaided eye, but can be easily appreciated through a small telescope. Barnard’s star is a red dwarf 5.96 light years away from Earth, and is the second closest star to the Sun. In 2018, an exoplanet of 3.2 times the Earth’s mass was discovered orbiting Barnard’s star.

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