The constellation Sail is located in the southern hemisphere of our sky. Although part of it can be observed in Russia. Its area is more than 500 square meters. This means that the constellation Sail is the thirty-second largest star cluster in the list. It has 195 stars visible from our planet with the naked eye.
History of observations
Constellations in the sky have been of interest to people since ancient times. Already representatives of the first civilizations peered into the sky, trying to connect the nature of luminous stars and the essence of things in the world. Interestingly, the constellation of the Sail in the ancient world was considered part of another, more significant cluster of stars called the Argo Ship. In this cluster, you can even identify more than a hundred stars with the naked eye. This name was given to it by the ancient Greeks, who associated these stars with the myth of the campaign of the Argonauts and Jason for the Golden Fleece. The goddess Hera raised the ship to heaven, turning it into a constellation to forever remind people of the brilliant campaign of the brave Greek travelers inColchis.
Only in the middle of the 18th century, at the initiative of the French astronomer Nicolas Lacaille, the map of the constellations was somewhat transformed and this huge nebula was divided into three. The constellations of Carina, Korma and Sail proper were highlighted in it. A little later, the Compass cluster was also identified. In addition to those noted, the constellation of the Sail is surrounded by clusters of Pump, Centaurus, and the Southern Cross. The development of technologies, including huge telescopes, as well as the mathematical apparatus, made it possible during this period to make a significant breakthrough in the study and description of the properties of space. In particular, individual stars of the Parusa cluster were carefully considered and studied. So a double star near the constellation consists of components of the second and fourth magnitudes, which are located at a distance of forty arc seconds from each other. Moreover, the main component of this pair is itself a binary system with two neighboring stars. Both of them are approximately thirty masses of our Sun. By the way, the double stars in the constellation Sails are not at all unique in this respect. Rather, on the contrary. Most of the "suns" in our night sky are actually close systems of two, three, and sometimes four objects. It is not always visible to the naked eye, but can be detected with powerful telescopes.
The orbital period of rotation in this pair of stars in the constellation Parus is more than 78 Earth days. In the same cluster there is another interesting star with very interesting for astrophysicistsqualities. We are talking about the neutron star pulsar Vela. Pulsars are extremely unusual cosmic bodies already in that they emit a monstrous force of radio emission. In addition, they are continuously rotating. Thus, the radiation falls on an outside observer with a certain periodicity - the star, as it were, blinks. For example, the Vela pulsar from the constellation of the Sail rotates about 11 times per second. It was discovered one of the first stars of this type, in 1977. Interestingly, the first detected radio pulses from such stars caused an incredible stir in the scientific community, as they were mistaken for messages from alien civilizations.
