Location and Visibility
Beta Pictoris is a star in the southern constellation of Pictor, the Easel, and is located to the west of the bright star Canopus. The distance to Beta Pictoris was found by measuring the star's trigonometric parallax. The star has an apparent visual magnitude of 3.861, so is visible to the naked eye under good conditions, though light pollution may result in stars dimmer than magnitude 3 being too dim to see. It is the second brightest in its constellation, exceeded only by Alpha Pictoris, which has an apparent magnitude of 3.30.
The distance to Beta Pictoris and many other stars was measured by the Hipparcos satellite. This was done by measuring its trigonometric parallax: the slight displacement in its position observed as the Earth moves around the Sun. Beta Pictoris was found to exhibit a parallax of 51.87 milliarcseconds, a value which was later revised to 51.44 milliarcseconds when the data was reanalyzed taking systematic errors more carefully into account. The distance to Beta Pictoris is therefore 63.4 light years, with an uncertainty of 0.1 light years.
The Hipparcos satellite also measured the proper motion of Beta Pictoris: it is traveling eastwards at a rate of 4.65 milliarcseconds per year, and northwards at a rate of 83.10 milliarcseconds per year. Measurements of the Doppler shift of the star's spectrum reveals it is moving away from us at a rate of 20 km/s. Several other stars share the same motion through space as Beta Pictoris and likely formed from the same gas cloud at roughly the same time: these comprise the Beta Pictoris moving group.
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