Celestia Forums

Hello

I have questions related to the hipparcos catalogue. I like to know what kind of star-properties it is possible to extract from this catalogue.

I was already at the hipparcos-website to try to figure it out myself, but as I am anything else than an expert on the matter, I got very confused about all the attributes in the catalogue. I hope someone here can help me out a little...

As far as I know, I can get the star's distance and its luminosity and of course position from the catalogue. What I like to know is, can I get the following properties also?

-Mass
-Diameter
-Star type (white dwarf, neutron star, red giant, multiple star system, ...)
-temperature
-velocity(transverse / radial)
-age
-...


I know this is somewhat of a general question, but Im really out in the wind here, trying to get a basic Idea of the whole thing, on whats possible and whatnot. Also can I get everything I get out of the hipparcos catalogue out of the Tycho catalogue, only less accurate?

Any help would be great, and really appreciated!

You can get some of those. Here's how I do it (this is to get all stars close to Sol):

1) go to http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=I/239
2) press the 1/239/hip_main button (top of the list)
3) Tick the "galactic" and "J2000" boxes
4) enter your search query (eg "1000" into the HIP box to find HIP 1000)
5) on the output page, click the "All columns" box at the top and resubmit the query.
6) trawl through the columns looking for what you want.

Age, Mass and diameter aren't in there, but spectral type usually is. You'd have to calculate the luminosity from the visual magnitude (VMag) and the parallax (Plx) to see if the star is a giant or a main sequence star. Proper motion is listed, but I don't know if that's the format you want.

Thanks for the info!

Doesn't the spectral type already has the info about star type (giant, dwarf, ...)?

sometimes. But may times they miss out the size and just have the type.

For age related data (14000 stars worth!) One of our illustrious colleagues pointed me at:

http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?V/117

Some of it is rather surprising (primarily in its potential error field), but its a nice bit of kit to have

Regards,

Cormie