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A variable star is a star whose brightness changes over time as seen from Earth. These stars matter because their brightness patterns help astronomers measure cosmic distances and understand what's happening inside stars.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- star
- Image
- Eso2003c.jpg
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- Commons category
- Variable stars
- topic's main category
- Category:Variable stars
- has characteristic
- change
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
- topic has template
- Template:Variable star topics
- Stack Exchange tag
- astronomy.stackexchange.com/tags/variable-star
- short name
- Var
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Encyclopedic overview
Comparison of VLT-SPHERE images of Betelgeuse taken in January 2019 and December 2019, showing the changes in brightness and shape. Betelgeuse is an intrinsically variable star.
A variable star is a star whose brightness as seen from Earth (its apparent magnitude) changes systematically with time. This variation may be caused by a change in emitted light or by something partly blocking the light, so variable stars are classified as either:
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “variable star” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
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