Krüger 60

Did You Know?

• In 1890 Adalbert Krueger published a part of the AGK catalogue with stars between declination +55 and +65, noting which appeared double.
• Sherburne Wesley Burnham observed 67 of these candidate double stars in 1894, including number 60 from Krueger's list.
• The system was later called Kruger 60, after star 13170 from Krueger's catalogue.

Description

The binary system Krüger 60 consists of two stars: the larger primary, component A, and the smaller secondary, component B. Component A possesses roughly 27% of the Sun's mass and 30% of its radius, while component B has about 18% of the Sun's mass and 21% of its radius. In 1951, astronomers Peter van de Kamp and Sarah Lee Lippincott identified component B as a flare star, later designated DO Cephei, with recorded flares lasting up to an hour. The system travels through the Milky Way on an orbit that brings it between 7 and 9 kiloparsecs (23,000 to 29,000 light-years) from the galactic core, with an orbital eccentricity of 0.126 to 0.130. Its closest approach to the Sun will happen in roughly 88,600 years, when it will pass within 1.95 parsecs. Detecting an exoplanet via radial velocity is challenging because the system's orbital plane is likely tilted only 13 degrees from our line of sight, producing a radial velocity signal about one-fifth as strong as that from an edge-on orbit.