Talk:Sirius

mas
Under the section 'Apparent Third Star', a reference is made to "0.09 arcseconds". If someone just hovers over 'mas' and reads what the popup says, they might think mas means 'minute of arc'. In other words, it would be nice if when you hover cursor over mas, the first word you see is 'milliarcseconds'. 162.207.203.26 (talk) 04:47, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
 * But it is already set up in this way? Ruslik_ Zero 21:07, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Not sure set up is the right way to describe it. The val template wikilinks the unit mas to milliarcsecond, which is a redirect to Minute and second of arc.  The tooltip for non-logged-in users shows the main image for the linked article and a short piece of the lead.  It doesn't respect sections, so in this case it doesn't really say anything about milliarcseconds specifically.  I don't see any simple workaround, short of the wiki tooltips getting smarter.  val can be configured to link to something else, but I don't see anything obvious that would help.  An article for this relatively obscure unit, just to solve this issue, seems out of step with the relevant policies. Lithopsian (talk) 19:07, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Fate of Sirius B
It has been suggested that the furture fate of Sirius B is to become a type Ia supernova, and although uncited that this is obvious. This is not obvious. Only a small proportion of white dwarfs will ever become a supernova. We still don't fully understand (or understand at all) exactly what type of situation produces a type Ia supernova but it is relatively (relatively, as in extremely) rare compared to the number of white dwarf binaries. Regardless, it would certainly not be obvious to the average non-astronomer that this would be the case, so a reliable source is required before including it in the article. Lithopsian (talk) 16:56, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

How can Sirius A become a white dwarf?
Sirius A has 2 Solar masses. Don't stars from 1.4 Solar masses on go supernova, becoming neutron stars or black holes? Why shall Sirius A share a similar fate like the Sun? 212.186.15.63 (talk) 06:37, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Only stars more massive than 8-10 solar masses go supernova. Ruslik_ Zero 12:40, 8 February 2020 (UTC)


 * They usually say 1.4 solar masses, don't they? Since the Sun is said to lose almost half its mass during its red giant phase, maybe the same happens to Sirius A. Then it matches: it would become a white dwarf. 212.186.15.63 (talk) 16:45, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You're getting confused with the Chandrasekhar limit, which relates to the mass of the star after it becomes a white dwarf Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 18:26, 8 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you. So since Sirius A loses enough mass when becoming a red giant, and again by a planetary nebula, its remaining mass will be low enough that it will be a white dwarf? 212.186.15.63 (talk) 18:56, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:39, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Actually, this mass can go to Sirius B, and maybe cause Sirius B to explode. Just my speculation- I have seen scenarios like this in the past. 122.60.58.55 (talk) 04:31, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

WP:URFA/2020
There is a dramatic layout mess and MOS:SANDWICHing throughout ... could someone address this ? Sandy Georgia (Talk)  19:41, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
 * (belatedly) have made a first sweep of redundant images...sigh Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:56, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

FA concerns
This article has been proposed to run as today's featured article in March. (Click here for more details.) However, I have some concerns that this article might not meet featured article criteria. Some of my concerns include:


 * Missing citations, which I have marked with "citation needed" tags. Some of these missing citations are for whole paragraphs.
 * MOS:SANDWICHING as noted by Sandy in November
 * Done. Attic Salt (talk) 02:31, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Citations that do not give specific page numbers (mostly journal articles)
 * I did what I could. Ap J seems to only give first page (maybe due to transition to online articles). Attic Salt (talk) 02:31, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Some paragraphs that are very long (paragraph 4 in "Observational history") and some that are only one sentence (and very short)
 * am trying to rectify this - regarding that long para.... where would you split it? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:32, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I would split it after "Queen of the Heaven" Z1720 (talk) 03:41, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * This paragraph is on one topic, Polynesian observations. The other paragraphs are on other, also self-contained communities. So I think we should leave the paragraph as is. Just my opinion. Attic Salt (talk) 03:52, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I think the thing to do is reduce all of those many, many, names that the Polynesians used. They are just a long list that adds little understanding. Doing this would make the paragraph shorter. Attic Salt (talk) 04:36, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm hesitant to remove names. How do we pick which Polynesian cultures get their name of the star listed? I prefer a separate paragraph describing what different Polynesian cultures called the star. Z1720 (talk) 16:13, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I am not generally in favour of lists of foreign language names, especially somewhat esoteric names, unless they contribute to the broader content of the article. Attic Salt (talk) 16:50, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Would sandwiching in a small thumbnail make the slabs of text a little less daunting? I'm thinking specifically of the heiroglyph which should be less wide than the first word of the section title so hardly likely to be a layout problem.  Lithopsian (talk) 16:05, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The "Other modern references" section is in list form. Would it be better served as prose?
 * I would prefer it in prose too. See the promoted version in 2008. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:28, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The description of Sirius in fiction is too short and could bring information from Sirius in fiction
 * I added a short paragraph giving a few of the more prominent (IMO) uses in science-fiction. There is already a good list of cultural uses and some random references not strictly referring to the star as a location in a story.  Lithopsian (talk) 16:08, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

Would anyone be interested in working on this article to get it ready for TFA? I'm pinging although any help would be appreciated. Z1720 (talk) 01:16, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I am on it - has a better understanding of the hard science than me so would be good to help out too :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:10, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

How's it looking so far? I know there are still a couple of citation needed tags. One is related to ancient understanding of the Sothic cycle which I'm probably not going to be much help with, although the whole claim looks slightly dubious. The other is about the position of Sirius in 14,000 years. I have checked the calculation and it appears correct, with proper motion included, but can't find any source to explicitly make the same claim. Lithopsian (talk) 20:32, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I've scheduled it TFA for March 21. I hope the remaining can be addressed by then? Suggest removing what can't be sourced by then, or modifying to fit what sources you can find. Thanks for your help in the matter.--Wehwalt (talk) 19:17, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I think its all done, fingers crossed. Lithopsian (talk) 20:18, 16 February 2021 (UTC)

simple question: in which galaxy is Sirius?
Strangely enough, a lot of time is spent explaining in which constellations stars live, but the galaxy to which they belong seems to be never mentioned. Sounds like prehistoric thinking to me... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.192.35.12 (talk) 19:11, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
 * You can see it, therefore it is in this galaxy. Not so much prehistoric as assuming a certain minimal level of knowledge - unfortunate perhaps, but necessary.  Lithopsian (talk) 16:51, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Sirius is 8 light years away from Sun.
 * Milky Way galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 light years.
 * So it's obvious that Sirius is inside the Milky Way Galaxy.
 * Note that the neighbour galaxy of Andromeda is 2,500,000 light years away.
 * Conclusion: When you want to know which galaxy a star belongs to, just know the distance of the star. Because constellations are an area in the sky from our perspective; hence two or more galaxies can be in one constellation. Note that when you look at the sky and see stars they might be several light years away from each other both horizontally and vertically. Just like when you look at a distant tree and a distant car from a distance, and you see both beside each other. But in fact they are far from each other. Aminabzz (talk) 21:23, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Do we have any NAMED stars in Andromeda or the Magellanic Clouds, anyway? 2603:6080:21F0:6140:54CA:9001:27B8:D63 (talk) 21:33, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

intro copy of source or source copy of intro
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sirius&diff=prev&oldid=1027586003, I don't disagree, but if you know the date the sentence was written @ the article, i.e. which is a copy is determinable by comparison of the dates of publication ... as you know Autonomous agent 5 (talk) 20:12, 8 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The text was already in Wikipedia on the date the paper claims to have been written, and several years before that. If it was the other way round, it would be a copyright violation and should be removed.  Doesn't reflect well on the journal paper though.  Lithopsian (talk) 19:28, 9 June 2021 (UTC)
 * I guess imitation is the best form of flattery...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:44, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Proper motion?
The proper motion value in the infobox sets its reference as van Leeuwen, F. (November 2007), doi:10.1051/0004-6361:20078357, but that paper does not mention Sirius at all. Urhixidur (talk) 19:38, 8 November 2021 (UTC)
 * The paper is a description of the derivation of a large database of astrometric data for essentially all the Hipparcos stars. You can query it online at, for example, VizeR.  Or the highlights are reproduced on the Simbad page for the star.  Lithopsian (talk) 20:04, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

the fifth closest stellar system to the Sun
Is it really relevant that Sirius is "the fifth closest stellar system"? I would suppose that the reader would be more interested in learning, that Sirius is the seventh closest system, after Alpha Centauri, Barnard's Star, Luhman 16 (no star!), WISE J085510.74-071442.5 (no star!), Wolf 359, and HD 95735. I suggest that the passage is rephrased to "and it is the seventh closest system to the Sun" and a link is added to the article List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs. CalRis (talk) 12:35, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is "relevant" (strange choice of words) - interesting fact that should stay. 50.111.25.27 (talk) 08:37, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

Wrong absolute magnitude
The absolute magnitude stated on Sirius A is said to be 1.42 I downloaded the cited source and in there it's stated (twice) that it's actually -1.42

"This was determined through a comparison with stars in the North Polar Sequence5, or bright stars in the vicinity of Sirius, and yielded mV (Sirius)=–1.42±0.03,..." (Page 97, also table at page 189)

This is also in range of the absolute magnitude stated by other sources. E.g. VizieR states that it's -1.58 ( http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-S?HD%2048915 ) 2A02:8388:A84:DE80:49CE:24BF:CEC0:7D04 (talk) 17:41, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
 * See absolute magnitude and apparent magnitude, two different things. Lithopsian (talk) 18:14, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That's correct, but still the source cited doesn't even mention the absolute magnitude.
 * The German version of Wikipedia does a better job at it linking to this statement:
 * Berechnet sich aus scheinbarer Helligkeit und Parallaxe: M = m + 5 + 5·log(Parallaxe) = −1,46 + 5 + 5·log(0,379″) = +1,43 mag (siehe Entfernungsmodul).
 * (Calculates from the apparent magnitude and parallax: M = m + 5 +5·log(parallax) = −1,46 + 5 + 5·log(0,379″) = +1,43 mag (see distance modulus)
 * So the value is correct, but the stated source isn't even talking about it. 2A02:8388:A84:DE80:49CE:24BF:CEC0:7D04 (talk) 18:42, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Also even if the values used in that source were used (as quoted apparent magnitude = -1.42, parallax 380.023) the calculated absolute magnitude would be
 * -1.42 + 5 + 5*log(0.380023) = 1.479
 * So stating that this source leads to an absolute magnitude of 1.42 is wrong. 2A02:8388:A84:DE80:49CE:24BF:CEC0:7D04 (talk) 19:05, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Better? Lithopsian (talk) 20:00, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Surface Gravity, meaningless units
Surface gravity is expressed as an acceleration, conventionally,  m/s2. Expressing it as cgs is gibberish. cgs is centimetre gram scale, a general description of a scale system, not a unit of acceleration. Sadly, this error has made its irritating wsy into almost every wiki on stars. Also log g is meaningless. There are many different logs, ln, log10 etc. It is therefore necessary to specify which log is being quoted. 209.93.146.80 (talk) 10:17, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your concern, but claiming that essentially every professional astronomer in existence is talking gibberish might be a little above your pay grade. cgs, as linked in all those articles you think are meaningless is a *system* of units in which, quoting from the Wikipedia article, "All CGS mechanical units are unambiguously derived from these three base units".  Hence the cgs units of acceleration are unambiguously cm/s$2$.  The logarithm (base 10) of such an acceleration does not technically have units, but are understood from being designated in the cgs system.  This usage is almost universal in astrophysics, probably for historical reasons, but perhaps just because the results fall in a nice range of small (almost always) positive numbers.  You can read more, and follow the references, at Surface gravity.  Lithopsian (talk) 16:03, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
 * As Lithopsian correctly stated, the unit of acceleration is cm s-2 in the cgs (centimetre-gramme-second) system of units. The convention across the sciences is for log to mean log10. The very old convention of expressing surface gravities of stars as log10( g / cms-2) has persisted, where g is the acceleration due to gravity at the surface, even though cgs units are virtually never encountered elsewhere. A more modern practice would be to express surface gravities as log10( g / ms-2), but this is still not done widely done. TowardsTheLight (talk) 20:17, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

Sirius B
Why does Sirius B has a surface temperature of 25,000 Kelvins, while it has a radius 0.0084 times that of the Sun and also a luminosity 0.056 times that of the Sun? Aminabzz (talk) 21:25, 20 May 2023 (UTC)


 * Sirius B is a white dwarf. SevenSpheres (talk) 21:58, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
 * This type of question should be referred to the Wiki Help Desk, unless you are requesting some change to the article. 2603:6080:21F0:6140:54CA:9001:27B8:D63 (talk) 21:36, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

Splitting proposal
I propose that the section about Sirius B be split into a separate page called. Sirius B is notable enough to deserve its own article, there are multiple papers dedicated only to it, these can be used to write a lot of content that can't be written into a single section. While writing about multiple-star systems in a single article is common in Wikipedia, it isn't a convention, and there are exceptions to it, such as Mira and Mira B, Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri, VB 10 and Gliese 752, and even Fomalhaut, TW Piscis Austrini and Fomalhaut C. 21 Andromedae (talk) 14:22, 27 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Weak oppose In general there are only separate articles for components of widely-separated multiple star systems, that appear as separate objects in the sky. This is the case for Alpha Centauri and Fomalhaut (and Proxima is exceptional as the nearest star). I'm not sure why Mira B and VB 10 have their own articles and I supported merging the latter. I don't see a real need for two separate articles and it would make them more difficult to maintain. If such a split is to be done though Sirius B makes more sense than most other stars, since it's well-known as the nearest white dwarf, so only a weak oppose. SevenSpheres (talk) 15:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Oppose, as what is observed and defined as 'Sirius' is the pairing. Instead of having pages named Sirius A and Sirius B the commonsense choice is to keep the binary stars as a single article, an article which has been featured twice. Randy Kryn (talk) 22:54, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Then just keep the current page name as Sirius. Sirius A is unambigously known as "Sirius" and this article will talk a little about Sirius B too. 21 Andromedae (talk) 23:39, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Comment: even if it is split off, the current content would need to remain for summary purposes. Praemonitus (talk) 02:46, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
 * The proposal tag was deleted from the article by an anonymous IP editor. Reinstated, until such time there is consensus. Neatly95 (talk) 01:19, 9 July 2024 (UTC) Neatly95 (talk) 01:19, 9 July 2024 (UTC)