RIGEL (beta Orionis) is "the left leg of Orion". It is a blue
supergiant and also a double star. It is the seventh brightest star in
sky. Some stars are bright because they are nearby and others are bright
because their absolute magnitude (true brightness) is very great.
Rigelis both: it is only about 910 light years away and it is about
150,000 times as bright as the Sun.
Non-LTE effects prevent from using Kurucz models to fit the flux
distribution. Red crosses in the IUE spectra indicate bad-quality
points.
Back to the Flux Distribution page