Wikipedia Article of the Day
Randomly selected articles from my personal browsing history
40 Eridani is a triple star system in the constellation of Eridanus, abbreviated 40 Eri. It has the Bayer designation Omicron2 Eridani, which is Latinized from ο2 Eridani and abbreviated Omicron2 Eri or ο2 Eri. Based on parallax measurements taken by the Gaia mission, it is about 16.3 light-years from the Sun. The primary star of the system, designated 40 Eridani A and named Keid, is easily visible to the naked eye. It is orbited by a binary pair whose two components are designated 40 Eridani B and C, and which were discovered on January 31, 1783, by William Herschel.: p73  It was again observed by Friedrich Struve in 1825 and by Otto Struve in 1851. In 1910, it was discovered that although component B was a faint star, it was white in color. This meant that it had to be a small star; in fact it was a white dwarf, the first discovered. Although it is neither the closest white dwarf, nor the brightest in the night sky, it is by far the easiest to observe; it is nearly three magnitudes brighter than Van Maanen's Star, the nearest solitary white dwarf, and unlike the companions of Procyon and Sirius it is not swamped in the glare of a much brighter primary.
History
Dec 21
Poisson point process
Dec 20
Generic top-level domain
Dec 19
Beale ciphers
Dec 18
Heavyweight (podcast)
Dec 17
MurmurHash
Dec 16
Attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan
Dec 15
Mnemonic major system
Dec 14
Peter M. Lenkov
Dec 13
Lagrange polynomial
Dec 12
Polynomial interpolation
Dec 11
Newton polynomial
Dec 10
Quantile function
Dec 9
Static site generator
Dec 8
Flag Day (United States)
Dec 7
Seven-segment display character representations
Dec 6
Tori Kelly
Dec 5
Lynn Conway
Dec 4
G7
Dec 3
Nostr
Dec 2
Negative binomial distribution
Dec 1
Toledo War
Nov 30
Laurent series
Nov 29
Interface control document
Nov 28
ANT (network)
Nov 27
Functional analysis
Nov 26
Semiring
Nov 25
Projective set (disambiguation)
Nov 24
Primitive polynomial
Nov 23
Syphilis
Nov 22
Mud dauber