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The naming of planets differs between planets of the Solar System and exoplanets (planets of other planetary systems). Exoplanets are commonly named after their parent star and their order of discovery within its planetary system, such as Proxima Centauri b. (The lettering starts at b, with a considered to represent the parent star.)
Marginal cases are allowed; for example, a star may be either a supergiant or a bright giant, or may be in between the subgiant and main-sequence classifications. In these cases, two special symbols are used: A slash (/) means that a star is either one class or the other. A dash (-) means that the star is in between the two classes.
Many of these planets are of considerable size, approaching the mass of small stars, while many newly discovered brown dwarfs are, conversely, small enough to be considered planets. [81] The material difference between a low-mass star and a large gas giant is not clear-cut; apart from size and relative temperature, there is little to separate a ...
A class of extrasolar planets whose characteristics are similar to Jupiter, but that have high surface temperatures because they orbit very close—between approximately 0.015 and 0.5 AU (2.2 × 10 ^ 6 and 74.8 × 10 ^ 6 km)—to their parent stars, whereas Jupiter orbits its parent star (the Sun) at 5.2 AU (780 × 10 ^ 6 km), causing low ...
However, a similar situation already applies to the term 'moon'—such bodies ceasing to be moons on being ejected from planetary orbit—and this usage has widespread acceptance. Another criticism was that the definition did not differentiate between planets and brown dwarf stars. Any attempt to clarify this differentiation was to be left ...
A-type star In the Harvard spectral classification system, a class of main-sequence star having spectra dominated by Balmer absorption lines of hydrogen. Stars of spectral class A are typically blue-white or white in color, measure between 1.4 and 2.1 times the mass of the Sun, and have surface temperatures of 7,600–10,000 kelvin.
The brightest stars, on either scale, have negative magnitude numbers. The variation in brightness (ΔL) between two stars is calculated by subtracting the magnitude number of the brighter star (m b) from the magnitude number of the fainter star (m f), then using the difference as an exponent for the base number 2.512; that is to say:
Hotter main-sequence stars are more luminous but shorter lived. The Sun's temperature is intermediate between that of the hottest stars and that of the coolest stars. Stars brighter and hotter than the Sun are rare, whereas substantially dimmer and cooler stars, known as red dwarfs, make up about 75% of the fusor stars in the Milky Way. [80]