Bellatrix

March 08, 2019

A lot of attention gets paid to Orion’s right shoulder… the red giant Betelgeuse. It’s massive, it’s enormous, it may go supernova in our lifetime… but the hunter’s left shoulder is pretty interesting too.

Bellatrix, latin for Female Warrior, is also known as the Amazon Star, after the greek legend of a mythical female warrior tribe. It’s almost 4 times hotter than our sun, more than 5.5 times its size, more than 8.5 times as massive, and more than 6,000 times brighter.

And it’s young… a newborn compared to our star… only about 25 million years old. But it is a different kind of star after all... Bright, hot, massive blueish stars like Bellatrix are classified as B-type stars, which are so energetic that they don’t live very long. The hotter the fire, the faster the fuel burns… same principle.

One of the more interesting things about Bellatrix is the fact that most of the stars in Orion have been shown to originate from around the same place. But Bellatrix is so much closer to our solar system than almost any of the stars in Orion that it’s definitely independent of its neighbors in our night sky at only around 250 light years away. Compare that to the stars in Orion’s belt at 1200 to 2000 light years from Earth.

And for a long time, Bellatrix was considered by scientists to be one of the most stable stars in the night sky in terms of brightness, so it was used as a control to measure the variable brightness of other stars. But now, with more modern technology and methods, we know that Bellatrix misbehaves a little too. As the saying goes: Well-behaved women seldom make history.